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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.'"
Probably because the iPhone 5 comes out in a month or two and they need something that works now. I'm sure once they have something stable they will switch to an in-house solution.
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.
*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.