Apple's long term strategy is not revealed by today's partners or "hires.". My personal guess is that this is a low risk cost, capital investment, to learn what makes sense to insource and outsource. Simple dumb plumbing may be right approach, but if Apple goes disruptive in the cloud all bets are off. I
f it chooses to push the technology and business models it will be on Apple's private infrastructure. Microsoft and Amazon are more than suppliers they are powerful competitors (Samsung has also elected to become and Apple will treat them accordingly) and Apple will not have the leverage or privacy it requires in the long run. So day1 of iCloud is not necessarily the model of the future.
In 1994 Apple bought a customized version of PL/1 code from AOL to create the short-lived eWorld online service. It even ran on Stratus computers, like AOL.
Marketing was the difference between AOL's success and Apples failure. AOL spent millions on marketing, while Apple spent thousands.
I think what the rumor is is that iCloud will work with Microsoft and Amazon in addition too. iCloud is not going to store much more than what Me.com does right now. Apple has been allowing people to register for an Apple account for a while. And I'd say a large portion of them already subscribe to me.com. Apple is also killing off some Sync services and iDisk, which will reduce the load on their systems somewhat.
Net gain, when iCloud opens, they could probably run it without additional hardware. But what if iCloud took care of getting stuff for you from multiple cloud services. Now that would be awesome. You could have stuff on Microsoft, or Amazon, or maybe Google. And iCloud and your OS X/iOS device could just work with those without having to run a separate app. It was just all in iOS5. It would just go, through iCloud, and get the stuff from wherever for you.
Now that would be what I think Apple is heading towards. I'd love to have my iOS device just KNOW that I have a datafile in DropBox, or something was changed on my Amazon service and it just goes and gets it and I don't have to do anything.
That would make more sense. I don't see Apple ever just handing something off to another company, especially customer data. It would be like Apple saying that it couldn't handle the backend of running iTunes and letting Microsoft run it.
I think what the rumor is is that iCloud will work with Microsoft and Amazon in addition too. iCloud is not going to store much more than what Me.com does right now. Apple has been allowing people to register for an Apple account for a while. And I'd say a large portion of them already subscribe to me.com. Apple is also killing off some Sync services and iDisk, which will reduce the load on their systems somewhat.
I can't see Apple letting anyone else put Apple customer info of any kind on servers that Apple doesn't control, so the bits of the rumor that imply that will happen I call false. Yes they use partners for iTunes but that's just for the purchase items (the music, movies etc). The customer data has stayed with Apple.
Now could Apple be using said software on Apple controlled servers. Yeah I would say they could. Why not. It is software made for large scale server situations, something OS X Server has never been able to handle (I'm not sure it was ever meant to)
Quote:
Originally Posted by ArtDecoDalek
Why AppleInsider is reporting this bullshit is another question.
1. The page hit when you came to read the story (might be two if you aren't using a RSS feed for the headlights)
2. The page hit when you came to comment how stupid the story is.
AI doesn't have any, apparently. This is an ongoing chronic problem here. Makes it feel cheap and second rate compared to the other Mac sites I frequent.
As others have said why did they build that data center. Now maybe they have an intention here to use these services as a backup of sorts or maybe to serve far flung parts of the world. I just dont see Apple giving up something as critical as iCloud completely to third parties.
I suspect the article is based on incomplete info. That is the story is partly warped due to incomplete data.
They've only built one data centre and compared to Microsoft and Amazon there fairly new to the game of running there own data centres. iTunes is bascially the only large cloud operation they have and that's mainly hosted by other people.
As they've only built 1 data center it also means it's only in one country. Doesn't make much sense sending all of Europes data all the way to the US when there's hosting they can use over here.
Lastly I don't know how much involvement Steve Job's actually has with Pixar but they launched a version of there rending software for smaller studios last year that built in Microsoft Azure, so it's not the first time he's used it.
AI doesn't have any, apparently. This is an ongoing chronic problem here. Makes it feel cheap and second rate compared to the other Mac sites I frequent.
I wonder how you'd go about applying for that position. My grammar has always been praised, so I'd love to be a proofreader in a semi-professional sense.
It is the right choice, they aren't so great at server side. But I don't think Microsoft should crow too much about it, if they indeed striped it on Amazon. It shows they don't trust either service completely. Or else it's for corporate strategic reasons.
It's not about trust. Its about smart business practices. You always have multiple vendors for services. If one of them fails you have a backup with the other. All companies do this. Apple does this with all of its hardware suppliers as well....
This is RUMOR ---- This is RUMOR ---- THIS IS A RUMOR!!!
Apple could still be using XSan or something for hosting the iCloud, we don't know for certain that they are using Microsoft technology on noting this.
Of Course, the most stable way would be to use Linux, after all, or some Unix variant....maybe IBM Power 7.
Apple will initially harness its three data centers for the iCloud launch, including a state-of-the-art new data center in Maiden, N.C., but the company anticipates needing further support as iCloud adoption ramps up. By comparison, Microsoft has built out at least 24 Azure data centers around the world.
"By comparison"?
"Jack has three coins, one of which has been discussed many times and is very large. By comparison, Jill, has 24 coins." The only coin that's ever been in the news (in Apple forums) is the one big coin Jack has, and yet *none* of us even know the value of *that* one, let alone any of the others.
Comparison, indeed. Jill might have a bunch of pennies, and Jack might have two pesos and a quarter, for all this crackerjack reporting tells us.
"Apple may be hedging its bets with both Microsoft and Amazon in order to avoid any mishaps with the iCloud launch. Amazon has in recent months suffered a series of embarrassing outages that have shaken customer faith in its cloud services."
So, go with Amazon? Hedging its bets to guarantee "embarrassing outages"?
If I understand you, I think you're missing the point. It sounds like Apple is using Azure + Amazon in such a way that they'll only have an outage if *both* Azure and Amazon go out. Since this is only a rumor (and from The Register, at that), who knows if that's what they're doing.
Technically it is impossible to scale to the level that is needed with Windows servers. If you have worked with large installations: the problem with windows is that you need to exponentially increase the server for double performance.
This is the reason why almost not one single computer on top 500 uses windows. It could even be zero.
This is false. The data center I use is 50,000 sq ft in the center of OC California with lots of top companies. I know the datacenter engineers quite well and they have told me that the ratio is 60% Windows and 40% Unix. The truth is that top companies have lots of different server requirements and they generally use a mix of Windows and Unix. I have a cabinet there and I have about 50/50 ratio as well.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Firefly7475
My guess is Apple would have coded iCloud in Java or platform independant C++. The server hardware/OS everything is on wouldn't matter so much..
Maybe JSP (Java Server Pages) which is quite likely, but not Java. C++ has no run time environment, so no. I think it will be platform independent and will likely use Oracle, which is also platform independent, for their database. Hopefully the script language will be JSP.
Quote:
Originally Posted by solipsism
There are some odd posts here. Apple has 3 data centers, right? That's not enough for the world's access to iCloud reliably and quickly. You need secondary servers to spread out the service for speed and redundancy. Apple has doing this for at least most of their iTunes Store existence.
They even use other companies for relaying their streaming which you can see in your web browser's address bar. It's not some crazy notion, it's highly expected they would farm out to reduce load and better the service for customers.
This of course is the correct reason, however, I am surprised Akamai was not mentioned since I believe they have a broader global deployment than either Amazon or MS.
So Apple built their massive new data center for what, exactly? Oh yeah, for hosting iCloud. Still, I can hardly blame Microsoft and Amazon for making a ludicrous attempt to grab some glory on their way out of the limelight. Why AppleInsider is reporting this bullshit is another question.
It's not bullshit. Apple has neither OS nor expertise to run the cloud backend. Why not just rent cheap storage and Linux servers from Amazon, people who specialize on the cloud storage and their business model is renting online computing and storage by the minute.
Apple exited the server business this year, and abandoned support for Java (guess what one of the major cloud cluster computing frameworks is based on Hadoop - which started as Java project). Apple wants to build end user devices and portables. But the other major part of this equation is the backend services and cloud computing. I think this will come back to bite Apple in a big way in a decade or so, when the rest of the industry catches up to the trend, and when your end device you use to "touch" the cloud becomes less relevant.
Perhaps Josh Ong should realize that the First Amendment does not preclude anyone from falsely "shouting fire in a crowded theatre."
Unless he has evidence that Apple used illegal methods to acquire Timmons services, describing the hiring as such is equally illegal.
I disagree that using the word "poached" in this manner is illegal. To address your proposed argument: this isn't a crowded theater, and nobody is actually shouting "fire". (Did the word "poached" actually frighten you and make you want to run out of the room you are sitting in?)
What you are really wanting to say is that this may be an instance of libel, with Apple as the victim. But I think that argument fails too. Most people reading this will recognize the use of the word "poached" as just an artistic vivid verb. That's because there is actually no such thing as "poaching" a human. The definition of the word is confined to the illegal taking of wild animals and plants. At best, you could chastise the writer for using it inappropriately, since it also implies illegal behavior that he can't prove.
[Update: Well, I was wrong and take the previous paragraph back, because apparently "employee poaching" has graduated from a euphemism to an actual term with a law attached and everything. However, still, in the case of this post and context, I still believe the next paragraph...]
But I don't see the malice, the harm, or the person that's really going to care enough to raise a snicker over it. (Except you just did. Are you especially sensitive to such topics?)
This is false. The data center I use is 50,000 sq ft in the center of OC California with lots of top companies. I know the datacenter engineers quite well and they have told me that the ratio is 60% Windows and 40% Unix. The truth is that top companies have lots of different server requirements and they generally use a mix of Windows and Unix. I have a cabinet there and I have about 50/50 ratio as well.
Maybe JSP (Java Server Pages) which is quite likely, but not Java. C++ has no run time environment, so no. I think it will be platform independent and will likely use Oracle, which is also platform independent, for their database. Hopefully the script language will be JSP.
This of course is the correct reason, however, I am surprised Akamai was not mentioned since I believe they have a broader global deployment than either Amazon or MS.
JSP is Java. You still need the JVM and majority of your code is in Java , you just expose it by writing "scirpts" to call into these Java classes and convert results on the fly to dynamic HTML on the server.
Writing web code in C++ is insanity, you get the unsafe code, slow development cycles and language that is slower to develop in. Java is light years ahead of C++ for web development. But if performance is not an issue, then Ruby and Python are excellent choices as well.
Not really. Xserve was a relatively underpowered server. For iCloud they will not be using wimpy 1U chassis machines. One trend now days is use to bigger boxes like 4U, with tons of RAM and big CPUs with lots of fans, then do vitalization. You get way more bang for your buck and better power usage. If they did choose to use smaller boxes it would probably be blades.
Apple always avoids entrusting their user experience to third parties when they can.
Why build a data center if you're going to outsource it?
Azure is way too new/unproven for them to even consider much less rely on.
I don't see why this is so hard to comprehend for people. Apple has NO products for Enterprise. What do you expect them to use? MySQL running on a Mac Pro, backed up by Time Machine? You can barely run a company internal Web server on that setup. Apple doesn't even sell a machine "expensive enough" for this type of operation—there are $50K servers out there that run circles around the highest end Mac Pro, with good reason—they cost $50K for starters.
On Mac OS X what will they use for data deduplication? Data center management? Virtual machine management? Backup? Security? Companies like Symantec and EMC have very expensive, very specific software for datacenter management. Apple is going to be using them to underpin the Azure apps on top. All that software runs on Windows and Linux, not Mac OS X.
Also, what do you guys think iTunes Store is running on? It's not Mac OS X…every time I've checked its Solaris or Unix servers running on HP machines…
Comments
f it chooses to push the technology and business models it will be on Apple's private infrastructure. Microsoft and Amazon are more than suppliers they are powerful competitors (Samsung has also elected to become and Apple will treat them accordingly) and Apple will not have the leverage or privacy it requires in the long run. So day1 of iCloud is not necessarily the model of the future.
In 1994 Apple bought a customized version of PL/1 code from AOL to create the short-lived eWorld online service. It even ran on Stratus computers, like AOL.
Marketing was the difference between AOL's success and Apples failure. AOL spent millions on marketing, while Apple spent thousands.
I think what the rumor is is that iCloud will work with Microsoft and Amazon in addition too. iCloud is not going to store much more than what Me.com does right now. Apple has been allowing people to register for an Apple account for a while. And I'd say a large portion of them already subscribe to me.com. Apple is also killing off some Sync services and iDisk, which will reduce the load on their systems somewhat.
Net gain, when iCloud opens, they could probably run it without additional hardware. But what if iCloud took care of getting stuff for you from multiple cloud services. Now that would be awesome. You could have stuff on Microsoft, or Amazon, or maybe Google. And iCloud and your OS X/iOS device could just work with those without having to run a separate app. It was just all in iOS5. It would just go, through iCloud, and get the stuff from wherever for you.
Now that would be what I think Apple is heading towards. I'd love to have my iOS device just KNOW that I have a datafile in DropBox, or something was changed on my Amazon service and it just goes and gets it and I don't have to do anything.
That would make more sense. I don't see Apple ever just handing something off to another company, especially customer data. It would be like Apple saying that it couldn't handle the backend of running iTunes and letting Microsoft run it.
It just won't happen.
i agree
I think what the rumor is is that iCloud will work with Microsoft and Amazon in addition too. iCloud is not going to store much more than what Me.com does right now. Apple has been allowing people to register for an Apple account for a while. And I'd say a large portion of them already subscribe to me.com. Apple is also killing off some Sync services and iDisk, which will reduce the load on their systems somewhat.
I can't see Apple letting anyone else put Apple customer info of any kind on servers that Apple doesn't control, so the bits of the rumor that imply that will happen I call false. Yes they use partners for iTunes but that's just for the purchase items (the music, movies etc). The customer data has stayed with Apple.
Now could Apple be using said software on Apple controlled servers. Yeah I would say they could. Why not. It is software made for large scale server situations, something OS X Server has never been able to handle (I'm not sure it was ever meant to)
Why AppleInsider is reporting this bullshit is another question.
1. The page hit when you came to read the story (might be two if you aren't using a RSS feed for the headlights)
2. The page hit when you came to comment how stupid the story is.
Cha-ching
Proofreader needed!
AI doesn't have any, apparently. This is an ongoing chronic problem here. Makes it feel cheap and second rate compared to the other Mac sites I frequent.
As others have said why did they build that data center. Now maybe they have an intention here to use these services as a backup of sorts or maybe to serve far flung parts of the world. I just dont see Apple giving up something as critical as iCloud completely to third parties.
I suspect the article is based on incomplete info. That is the story is partly warped due to incomplete data.
They've only built one data centre and compared to Microsoft and Amazon there fairly new to the game of running there own data centres. iTunes is bascially the only large cloud operation they have and that's mainly hosted by other people.
As they've only built 1 data center it also means it's only in one country. Doesn't make much sense sending all of Europes data all the way to the US when there's hosting they can use over here.
Lastly I don't know how much involvement Steve Job's actually has with Pixar but they launched a version of there rending software for smaller studios last year that built in Microsoft Azure, so it's not the first time he's used it.
Given the train wreck iDisk is, it would not be a surprise if they will rely on third party servers.
Dropbox relies on Amazon S3 and compared to iDisk it is more reliable.
AI doesn't have any, apparently. This is an ongoing chronic problem here. Makes it feel cheap and second rate compared to the other Mac sites I frequent.
I wonder how you'd go about applying for that position. My grammar has always been praised, so I'd love to be a proofreader in a semi-professional sense.
It is the right choice, they aren't so great at server side. But I don't think Microsoft should crow too much about it, if they indeed striped it on Amazon. It shows they don't trust either service completely. Or else it's for corporate strategic reasons.
It's not about trust. Its about smart business practices. You always have multiple vendors for services. If one of them fails you have a backup with the other. All companies do this. Apple does this with all of its hardware suppliers as well....
Apple could still be using XSan or something for hosting the iCloud, we don't know for certain that they are using Microsoft technology on noting this.
Of Course, the most stable way would be to use Linux, after all, or some Unix variant....maybe IBM Power 7.
Apple will initially harness its three data centers for the iCloud launch, including a state-of-the-art new data center in Maiden, N.C., but the company anticipates needing further support as iCloud adoption ramps up. By comparison, Microsoft has built out at least 24 Azure data centers around the world.
"By comparison"?
"Jack has three coins, one of which has been discussed many times and is very large. By comparison, Jill, has 24 coins." The only coin that's ever been in the news (in Apple forums) is the one big coin Jack has, and yet *none* of us even know the value of *that* one, let alone any of the others.
Comparison, indeed. Jill might have a bunch of pennies, and Jack might have two pesos and a quarter, for all this crackerjack reporting tells us.
"Apple may be hedging its bets with both Microsoft and Amazon in order to avoid any mishaps with the iCloud launch. Amazon has in recent months suffered a series of embarrassing outages that have shaken customer faith in its cloud services."
So, go with Amazon? Hedging its bets to guarantee "embarrassing outages"?
If I understand you, I think you're missing the point. It sounds like Apple is using Azure + Amazon in such a way that they'll only have an outage if *both* Azure and Amazon go out. Since this is only a rumor (and from The Register, at that), who knows if that's what they're doing.
Technically it is impossible to scale to the level that is needed with Windows servers. If you have worked with large installations: the problem with windows is that you need to exponentially increase the server for double performance.
This is the reason why almost not one single computer on top 500 uses windows. It could even be zero.
This is false. The data center I use is 50,000 sq ft in the center of OC California with lots of top companies. I know the datacenter engineers quite well and they have told me that the ratio is 60% Windows and 40% Unix. The truth is that top companies have lots of different server requirements and they generally use a mix of Windows and Unix. I have a cabinet there and I have about 50/50 ratio as well.
My guess is Apple would have coded iCloud in Java or platform independant C++. The server hardware/OS everything is on wouldn't matter so much..
Maybe JSP (Java Server Pages) which is quite likely, but not Java. C++ has no run time environment, so no. I think it will be platform independent and will likely use Oracle, which is also platform independent, for their database. Hopefully the script language will be JSP.
There are some odd posts here. Apple has 3 data centers, right? That's not enough for the world's access to iCloud reliably and quickly. You need secondary servers to spread out the service for speed and redundancy. Apple has doing this for at least most of their iTunes Store existence.
They even use other companies for relaying their streaming which you can see in your web browser's address bar. It's not some crazy notion, it's highly expected they would farm out to reduce load and better the service for customers.
This of course is the correct reason, however, I am surprised Akamai was not mentioned since I believe they have a broader global deployment than either Amazon or MS.
So Apple built their massive new data center for what, exactly? Oh yeah, for hosting iCloud. Still, I can hardly blame Microsoft and Amazon for making a ludicrous attempt to grab some glory on their way out of the limelight. Why AppleInsider is reporting this bullshit is another question.
It's not bullshit. Apple has neither OS nor expertise to run the cloud backend. Why not just rent cheap storage and Linux servers from Amazon, people who specialize on the cloud storage and their business model is renting online computing and storage by the minute.
Apple exited the server business this year, and abandoned support for Java (guess what one of the major cloud cluster computing frameworks is based on Hadoop - which started as Java project). Apple wants to build end user devices and portables. But the other major part of this equation is the backend services and cloud computing. I think this will come back to bite Apple in a big way in a decade or so, when the rest of the industry catches up to the trend, and when your end device you use to "touch" the cloud becomes less relevant.
Perhaps Josh Ong should realize that the First Amendment does not preclude anyone from falsely "shouting fire in a crowded theatre."
Unless he has evidence that Apple used illegal methods to acquire Timmons services, describing the hiring as such is equally illegal.
I disagree that using the word "poached" in this manner is illegal. To address your proposed argument: this isn't a crowded theater, and nobody is actually shouting "fire". (Did the word "poached" actually frighten you and make you want to run out of the room you are sitting in?)
What you are really wanting to say is that this may be an instance of libel, with Apple as the victim. But I think that argument fails too. Most people reading this will recognize the use of the word "poached" as just an artistic vivid verb. That's because there is actually no such thing as "poaching" a human. The definition of the word is confined to the illegal taking of wild animals and plants. At best, you could chastise the writer for using it inappropriately, since it also implies illegal behavior that he can't prove.
[Update: Well, I was wrong and take the previous paragraph back, because apparently "employee poaching" has graduated from a euphemism to an actual term with a law attached and everything. However, still, in the case of this post and context, I still believe the next paragraph...]
But I don't see the malice, the harm, or the person that's really going to care enough to raise a snicker over it. (Except you just did. Are you especially sensitive to such topics?)
Thompson
This is false. The data center I use is 50,000 sq ft in the center of OC California with lots of top companies. I know the datacenter engineers quite well and they have told me that the ratio is 60% Windows and 40% Unix. The truth is that top companies have lots of different server requirements and they generally use a mix of Windows and Unix. I have a cabinet there and I have about 50/50 ratio as well.
Maybe JSP (Java Server Pages) which is quite likely, but not Java. C++ has no run time environment, so no. I think it will be platform independent and will likely use Oracle, which is also platform independent, for their database. Hopefully the script language will be JSP.
This of course is the correct reason, however, I am surprised Akamai was not mentioned since I believe they have a broader global deployment than either Amazon or MS.
JSP is Java. You still need the JVM and majority of your code is in Java , you just expose it by writing "scirpts" to call into these Java classes and convert results on the fly to dynamic HTML on the server.
Writing web code in C++ is insanity, you get the unsafe code, slow development cycles and language that is slower to develop in. Java is light years ahead of C++ for web development. But if performance is not an issue, then Ruby and Python are excellent choices as well.
Apple has neither OS nor expertise to run the cloud backend.
No expertise? I'd think iTunes Store in and of itself qualifies Apple as an expertise in running services from the cloud.
This explains the death of XServe.
Not really. Xserve was a relatively underpowered server. For iCloud they will not be using wimpy 1U chassis machines. One trend now days is use to bigger boxes like 4U, with tons of RAM and big CPUs with lots of fans, then do vitalization. You get way more bang for your buck and better power usage. If they did choose to use smaller boxes it would probably be blades.
This is one of the more absurd rumors I've heard.
I don't see why this is so hard to comprehend for people. Apple has NO products for Enterprise. What do you expect them to use? MySQL running on a Mac Pro, backed up by Time Machine? You can barely run a company internal Web server on that setup. Apple doesn't even sell a machine "expensive enough" for this type of operation—there are $50K servers out there that run circles around the highest end Mac Pro, with good reason—they cost $50K for starters.
On Mac OS X what will they use for data deduplication? Data center management? Virtual machine management? Backup? Security? Companies like Symantec and EMC have very expensive, very specific software for datacenter management. Apple is going to be using them to underpin the Azure apps on top. All that software runs on Windows and Linux, not Mac OS X.
Also, what do you guys think iTunes Store is running on? It's not Mac OS X…every time I've checked its Solaris or Unix servers running on HP machines…