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Apple's iCloud Runs On Microsoft Azure
Front page first-timer ge7 writes "Apple's recently announced cloud storage and cloud service platform, iCloud, runs on their main competitor Microsoft's Azure platform and Amazon services. According to The Reg's sources, 'Microsoft insiders see the iCloud deal as a validation of Azure. iCloud puts Azure into a different league, given the brand love for Apple and the Apple management's fanatical attitude to perfection. It is a "huge consumer brand, a great opportunity to get Azure under a very visible workload." ... Apple has had a recent unpleasant experience in providing online services: in a famous memo, Steve Jobs admitted his company had "more to learn about internet services" following the outages and failures of his precursor to iCloud for email, contacts, calendar, photos and other files on MobileMe.'"
If I should laugh, cry or just be indifferent to this news.
Some apps are WYSIWYG. Some others are WYSIWTF.
Universe aligning to all vs Google
RGdot.com
Linux running on top of Windows
Oh... wait
It used to be Microsoft that got caught relying on other people's software. What's the world coming to?
[Queue Jon Stewart clip about Apple kicking down doors in Palo Alto while Bill Gates fights AIDS in Africa.]
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I'm surprised that Microsoft and Amazon apparently agreed not to publicize this. While I don't really care what Apple is using behind the scenes in iCloud - it's not like Apple's a serious player in server space, after all - I wouldn't think they'd have the leverage to dictate these sorts of terms with either company. Seriously, what are they going to do, walk away from the negotiating table? Who else could do it?
#DeleteChrome
The World is a disappointing place for a "everything is Black or White" -fanboy. iFad.
*** Fruits get old fast.
1) Why the need for Apple's huge data centre ? .. just to store music/movies ?
2) Why does Apple have such little confidence running iCloud but is okay running one of the world's biggest identity systems (AppleID) which contains a pretty ridiculous number of credit cards.
3) Very interesting approach since assumably they will be connecting to two different stacks Java/S3/EBS/EC2 .. and .Net/SQLServer. Not only data centre redundancy but also protects against issues like the recent Apache security scare.
4) Is multi-region data centres one of the key reasons ?
Remember Steve's quote about MS being trucks? So why not use them as a big truck. Back end. Where they belong. It's a giant public slap in the face to Microsot that know one else gets! Be our server slaves, stay in the closet, and let us (Apple) take care of the rest.
But isn't that the whole idea behind Azure? Microsoft wants to be the big truck people rely on behind the scenes.
I'm not a Microsoft fan - I've tried to remove their products from my life as much as possible - but I see this as a big win for them.
#DeleteChrome
This is weird. I feel weird. I need an adult.
Wow! That is huge fanboyism to suggest that by Apple choosing to use a Microsoft product that this would somehow be a slap in the face for Microsoft. Ha ha Microsoft, you lose because we chose to use your services.
Was their ever a chance that Apple would have considered using anything other than a back-end product from Microsoft? Did you expect that Apple would ever consider choosing Windows on the next Mac or Windows Phone to run their next iPhone or something?
Oh, or maybe a slap in the face is like a poke in Facebook. Does it mean to pay someone lots of money in a business transaction? I tell you, I just can't keep up with the modern business vernacular!
They discontinued the xServe, and os X has always seemed to not perform well in the server space. Good to hear that all is not what is seems.
...certainly used to be Microsoft, but if you look at the recent deluge of lawsuits I think one could argue that the title for "main Apple competitor" now lies somewhere between Samsung and Android.
Microsoft and Amazon platforms are incompatible, so to "stripe" anything between them, everything has to be done twice, for no reason whatsoever.
Someone is spewing bullshit, most likely The Register's "sources".
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Why would Apple build a brand new multimillion-dollar data facility, only to farm out their biggest and most high-profile internet services to external parties?
So Microsoft is not their competitor.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Only Linux is more reliable, but it's nowhere near as easy to manage, as I've learned repeatedly in 15 years in the industry.
15 years and still incompetent. Nice.
-- Linux user #369862
Lest you forget, MS kept Apple alive with a huge cash infusion when they were about to go under. They need each other. They're best frenemies.
MS may not quite have expected Apple to rebound as much as they did, but they need Apple to kick them in the ass, and Apple customers aren't really MS customers so they're not losing much. Apple needs Microsoft so their customers can keep pretending they're superior outsiders and not just too simple to figure out Windows's obtuse designed by engineers UI. And so they can keep painting Microsoft as Big Brother even when their own policies are far more totalitarian.
Apple can afford to go teehee at MS's pathetic attempts to stay relevant in the mobile phone sector, so no problem there, and Amazon is only a competitor as far as providing ebooks goes. Vexing, but not fatal.
Sorry, http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2011/06/16/icloud-mystery-is-apple-using-azure-amazon/
This news is OLD
Only Linux is more reliable,
Kid, you really need to broaden your horizons. There are systems still available from IBM, HP, Stratus and others that are so reliable that an unscheduled reboot warrants a visit from the vendor.
I guess you've never heard of a little side-project of Apple's called the "iTunes Store"?
It's daily transaction volumes are in the same neighborhood as Amazon's, and it is has been highly available and reliable.
I bet they're using only bare bones, like blob storage and possibly CDN, and then only temporarily until they roll their own. Apple is all about _control_ first and foremost.
And if I were Microsoft, I'd keep this one secret until _after_ they succeed, because it's not only a great opportunity to succeed. They could also fail quite spectacularly, too.
Heh, looking at the way things go the "HP" stuff might keep running for longer than HP does ;)
They wanted to get it out there in time and it was probably faster to throw something together on Azure instead of setting up their own servers. I'm sure iCloud is what Apple had in mind when they started building the huge data centers in North Carolina and I'm willing to bet Azure is only a temporary solution and eventually everything will be transferred to their new data center. They probably didn't want to risk another Mobile Me type release. Still, it's a tip of the hat to MS.
Amazon, Microsoft products run on Apple products
Apple built a masive new data centre and bought 12 Peta Bytes of EMC Isilon storage for their cloud services. This story does not make sence. BTW I work for EMC.
...are Microsoft and Apple "main" competitors?
Yep. Hey guy, you suck so here's some money! Oh and we're depending on you to make this work, but hah! Sucks to be you!
What platform does iTunes run on? I'm genuinely curious, but wouldn't be surprised if it's not, in fact, XServes.
You can't install OSX on a non Apple Hardware, is Apple violating the Apple License Agreement and has to sue itself???
Evidently you haven't heard the news that Enterprise is their core focus, now.
So it's either HP keeps their HP servers and HPUX operating system afloat, or they go under.
With the amount of money rolling through Enterprise, I doubt they'll sink.
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
You realize Linux is an operating system and you just named off hardware vendors, right?
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
apple isn't the enterprise in any way shape or form
oh sure, their product might get used in that space
but when the shit hits the fan apple take no responsibility
they've happier to say, "f u. just don't use it like that"
it's like how apple stores used wince for pos
it's like how apple don't use osx as their webserver os
in the end apple is sensible in the 'right tool for the right job' sense
given the various cross deals they've got with microsoft, why the hell not?
Request:
GET / HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: Opera/9.80 (X11; Linux x86_64; U; en) Presto/2.9.168 Version/11.50
Host: www.apple.com
Response:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Apache/2.2.3 (Oracle)
Muahahaha :D
Wikipedia says Azure was available commercially in February of 2010. So it's been on the market for a little over a year and a half.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
It's not in their interest to build an entire Cloud infrastructure. They're in business to sell Macs, iPads and iPhones - the stuff they bundle along with that is the gravy.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Under Wikipedia for Azure: Microsoft has stated that, per the Patriot Act, the USA government can have access to the data even if the hosted company is not American and the data resides outside the USA.[20]
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
1. Intentionally have "issues" with iCloud running on Azure and Amazon, discrediting the competition
2. BIG Announcement of the switch to new uber Apple infrastructure
3. ???
4. Profit!
I chose to end my comments, not with a rim shot, but a long decaying F#7sus4
...with an iPad, there sure would be hell to pay! _ o _
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Apple has never gotten the hang of online services. Picking Microsoft seems to be the logical continuation of their ineptitude.
Proving once again that Microsoft is a software company, and Apple couldn't write good software to save their lives.
Use Microsoft Azure - for large scale applications with flexible demands, it makes as much sense as not using Linux... oh wait...
Seriously. On the hardware front, they killed the X-serve and have nothing else that remotely is a workable solution for real high end, high density servers. Mac Minis are fine for small offices or homes that are messing with tiny servers, they aren't what you need for a cloud infrastructure.
On the software front their OS leaves something to be desired in the server arena but more importantly they have no real virtualization solution. You can only virtualize OS-X on OS-X so any of the bare metal solutions like vSphere are out, and the software for MacOS is decidedly consumer oriented like Fusion and Parallels.
So Apple's own technology, at present, is not at all suited for a cloud type system. For that you need a bunch of high power, high density servers that you can run VMs on so you can provision things as needed at a high speed.
Remember the big thing that separates a "cloud" from just a bunch of servers is the flexibility and provisioning. You go to a normal server host like, say, Pair networks and they can get you a server in fairly short order, a day or less probably. However if you want a bunch that'll take time as they'd have to order the hardware. You also pay per month regardless of usage because the hardware is there powers on using resources. With Amazon EC2 you can get not just a server in minutes, but thousands. You also can pay more based on usage, because idle servers don't have to take up resources. This is possible only because it is all virtual, and an extremely competent virtual setup.
Now maybe they fix that, or maybe they build a data centre with someone else's technology (their was a time they liked AIX, maybe they do that again). However that takes time and if they need shit now, well Amazon and Microsoft are two of the big ones that can deliver it.
At any rate right now, Apple isn't really in a good position to run their own cloud service.
Based on job postings over the years, it's more than likely a combination of various Unixes and Linux. It's definitely NOT Windows (or OS X for that matter).
Speaking of, if you search their job listings for the word "iCloud", almost every hit explicitly mentions Linux or UNIX, and most of the rest mention Perl, Ruby, Python, and other UNIXy applications. I didn't look at every single one of them, but the only one I saw that mentioned Windows at all was for testing the sync to iCloud functionally on Windows. I don't think I'm buying this story.
Sunwalker Dezco for Warchief in 2016
This is what it looks like to be in the end stages of being an Apple fanboy. You actually believe it's a "slap in the face" to Microsoft for Apple to run a portion of their business on an MS product. No awareness at all that Apple has to pay Microsoft for the privilege. No awareness that by Apple choosing a Microsoft product, they are saying tacitly that the Microsoft product is the best in its category.
Unless you are willing to take the next step and say that Apple is purposely running a portion of their business on an inferior product just so that they can say "Look! We have shamed Microsoft by giving them money for their obviously inferior product! How ignoble they are!"
Being Apple they would almost certainly add, "Now someone bugger me, with dispatch!"
You are welcome on my lawn.
ITunes store is an entirely different type of service. There is no customer storage to speak of.
It's pretty much an e-commerce store with a native client.
God makes them, then they find each other...
With the amount of money rolling through Enterprise, I doubt they'll sink.
Don't underestimate the sinking power of CEOs ;).
If Apple hosted it themselves, they'd still have to work under US law, so they'd turn your data over to the feds as well. If you don't like it, get the law changed, the companies have no choice but to follow it, so blaming them is pointless.
Just because the other US based cloud providers aren't advertising that fact it doesn't mean they wouldn't give the US government the same access.
Will the #2 and #3 join to become AppleSoft?
Complete BS.
Do you remember the huge mess Apple's MobileMe service was?
And frankly, what is Apple going to run their cloud service on?
The "server" version of mac os? Apple can't even implement LDAP authentication properly in mac os lion.
Apple (a hardware company) and Microsoft (organised crime^W^W uh, a "software company") are not really in competition.
you had me at #!
Solaris.
I entered www.apple.com/iCloud in Netcraft.com, and it showed the OS as Linux, and running Apache.
*YOU* can't virtualize OS X on vSphere, but they can. Because they own they software, they can do whatever they want with it.
I don't think anyone is surprised that they aren't running it on Mac OS X Server; they are surprised that they are (allegedly) running it on a MS product. It is well known that Apple hosts it's own services on Sun, Oracle, and (maybe) HP products. There long-existing web products (eg. the iTunes store) don't run on racks and racks of Xserves, if that's what you think.
Why wouldn't they be in a good position to run their own cloud service? Again, you need to throw out your assumption that their cloud service might be run on OS X and Mac hardware.
Isn't Apple's biggest competitor Google?
I'm sure more people are using Windows Vista than any version of Mac OS X.
Ummmm HPUX, AIX, OS2, Mainframe..... really? IBM makes waaaay more $$ from software and services, and HP is no slouch. My client is still rapidly deploying HPUX & AIX clusters faster than I can type this. And my company uses (arrgh!) Lotus Notes - IBM hardware, right? /sarcasm
Enlightenment is a pipe dream. So where's the pipe?
Is it possible this is just for people using other platforms? Pushing customers using Windows off to Windows land while the rest use the iTunes cloud makes sense to me.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
I'd argue Microsoft hasn't been Apple's main competitor for 4+ years now.
rooooar
You are Apple. What would it cost you to get as good a server internally? How can you leverage your iCloud threat-to-make in order to negotiate purchase price of the Buy? You are MS. What price do you set for a competitor with high volume and a possibly inferior product, who may decide to invest in making their product competitive with yours?
Gently reply
Obligatory XKCD
I was in an Apple facility a year or two ago doing a project for them. At one point it had been a manufacturing facility, but since all of that is in China now, it had been converted into the the most amazingly huge tech support call center. It was pretty cool seeing a sea of cubicles with adjustable height desks and huge monitors, but when we went into the mechanical area, the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) was controlled by several computers conspicuously running Windows XP. It wasn't surprising since I doubt any HVAC software exists for the OSX but I still got a chuckle out of it.
And this goes for all American companies, not only Microsoft. So even if Apple placed the data in it's own datacenter, they would still risk the data being turned over to the American government....
Businesses doing business! WOW! Who would have thunk it?!
You morons.
Apple has a service. The stuff they were doing wasn't working. So, they use something that works until they can properly perfect their own. Depending how that goes, maybe they won't even finish. Nothing to see here, move along
"BSD is about people pissing each other.." (Moid Vallat)
I am surprised this pure FUD got modded up. The Patriot Act affects every US based company and Apple would have to turn the data over even if they hosted it themselves.
"Any data which is housed, stored or processed by a company, which is a U.S. based company or is wholly owned by a U.S. parent company, is vulnerable to interception and inspection by U.S. authorities."
*YOU* can't virtualize OS X on vSphere,
Completely false.
http://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2011/08/when-can-i-run-apple-osx-on-vsphere-5.html
With the release of vSphere 5, you now can run OSX 10.7 (Lion), 10.6 (Snow Leopard) and 10.5 (Leopard) as a supported guestOS in ESXi 5.
The caveat is that in allowing VMware to run OSX as a virtual machine on vSphere 5, the physical hardware that ESXi 5 is running on MUST be Apple hardware and specifically the XServe 3.1. For those of you who do not follow Apple's hardware closely, the XServe line was recently EOL as of January 31, 2011.
(there are also methods to run os X on commodity x86 hardware, but that goes against Apple's eula if you care about such things)
Google is Apple's biggest competitor. Microsoft and Apple have extensive cross-licensing agreements in place, one of the first actions Steve Jobs took as the then-new CEO of Apple. Note Apple partnered with Microsoft on the Nortel patents as well, not with Google.
Azure - Does that mean Apple's iCloud software will run on Windows Server? Or does Microsoft provide Linux VMs? May be since Apple's server side software is developed in Java it doesn't matter but curious none the less why they chose Microsoft AND Amazon - apart from not putting all eggs in one basket.
serious computing was never apple's strong point.
Making toys for snobs with the dough to shell out on their stuff is..http://apple.slashdot.org/story/11/09/04/0051209/Apples-iCloud-Runs-On-Microsoft-Azure#
I'm sure your opinion is unbiased, "Linux user #520758."
The iTunes Store is very different from a data syncing service. You download your files once, and you're done. You may as well also cite Software Update.
I guess you've never heard of a little side-project of Apple's called the "iTunes Store"?
It's daily transaction volumes are in the same neighborhood as Amazon's, and it is has been highly available and reliable.
Oh really? Have you even heard of AWS? EC2? or any other of the platforms Amazon offers? It's not just about e-commerce
Way to completely miss the point. Apple can run OS X virtualized on any hardware at all, because Apple owns OS X and can do whatever they want with it.
While Apple and Microsoft are competing, relevant to iCloud Microsoft isn't in the game - Windows Phone 7 and Zune don't even get mention in their categories, and Microsoft currently doesn't have a tablet they direct-sell.
Amazon, however, is being lauded as the one who can kill Apple: upcoming Android tablet, and an Android app store. Granted, in many ways AWS is a very separate entity, but this is kinda big.
Agreed. Not sure why Apple would be embarrassed to use one of the leading back end products in their back end.
Not like they have a competing product they would be admitting is not up to it.
Way to completely miss the point.
Ummm, no.
The poster (DTemp 1086779) claimed that you (meaning the general public) aren't able to virtualize os X on vSphere.
That is a clear, unambiguous statement, and it's not true.
You are able to virtualize os X on vSphere 5 while following Apple's eula (under some conditions), and if you don't care about Apple's eula, you can virtualize os X on vSphere 4.x under most conditions.
The fact that (DTemp 1086779) said other things about Apple are irrelevant to the fact that they are wrong when it comes to virtualization.
Obivious idiot is obvious.
What country, exactly, does Apple have their head quarters in?
Troll? Troll? You goddamn stupid Apple fanboys. Everyone who doesn't agree with you is not a troll. I meant every single thing I said there.
Even if it isn't.
Anyone remember Geek Critical Mass from the BOFH?? :D
This is one of the funniest statements I have ever seen! What exactly are they perfecting? Crushing competitors using dodgy patents? Designing toys that look 1000% better than they run? What?
Remember Steve's quote about MS being trucks
This is a good point. MS is doing the truck software. The stuff that brings food out to the supermarkets, goods into the stores. You know, the important stuff that keeps society running. Apple is the Mazda Miata. A fun toy for sure, but not something one would miss terribly if it disappeared. Shut down the truck service and entire cities and communities would crumble and fall. Remove the Miata from the world and a number of gay guys without the income to buy a Jaguar XKR will feel miserable for at least a week.
Cloud computing, only get interesting when you off load Computational power to it. But at the moment and what most of the advertised usages for it are, storage for your files. And any large scale server will do that.
The only place of note that have real computational cloud computing is EC2 and Google. (Google doc's and maps - and even then i guess there is not a meaningful uptake on Google doc's as yet, can almost guarantee that anyone reading this still store their documents locally (smart phone, desktop, laptop)
Lots of datacenters have the ability to create a V.server fast about 15mins to almost any spec you need. but it will cost you and you would have to build the interface to get your files. (lots of service providers have fair use policies which will shaft you if you really use the cloud the way it is intended).
At the end of the day it a re badging of on-line storage, coming from the hope that no one really uses the space in datacenter's.
if you do a search on the real capacity of the shared datacenter space you use for your web space email and files. and then look at how many customers they have and compare this with what they say you have in storage, you will find the number done add up because they calculate that, Most people will not use any where near what they buy, so the rest is put in the pool for everyone to use. (note the is for shared platform hosting).
Hosting of any kind can be termed as could storage.
Back to my original point , it does not matter what the platform is as long as the end user is getting the services they pay for. to boil things down cloud storage is a database with the location of your files, thats about it.
Most people that are now turning to cloud services have been doing it since the early days of the internet, hosting files with a human friendly URL. it just been re-badged as could computing....!
I'm so glad someone else has pointed out that Apple can do whatever the hell they like with Mac OS X, including run it on VMware. Here are some other options Apple has:
1. Put some - ok, a lot - Mac Pro motherboards into rack mount dual power supply cases. Should be easy enough if you're ordering them by the hundreds or thousands.
2. Run Darwin rather than Mac OS X - they don't need the gui for the servers, do they?
3. Run OS X on whatever hardware they like. They're not in the server space, and they can run it on 8-CPU boxes from Oracle or IBM.
Apple have lots of options. Just because you don't have them doesn't mean they don't have them.
In other words they wanted to use something that just works.
"So Apple's own technology, at present, is not at all suited for a cloud type system. For that you need a bunch of high power, high density servers that you can run VMs on so you can provision things as needed at a high speed."
You're assuming they'd have to run their own OS, which is silly. They can run whatever they want that works for them, with any combination of Apple hardware, non-Apple hardware, Apple operating systems, non-Apple operating systems, non-Apple software, or Apple software, including Apple software that isn't available to the public.
The question is, are they going to build and run their cloud entirely in-house in their new datacenter, or will they offload some or all of it to outsiders for hosting on 3rd party cloud data centers.