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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.'"
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?
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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?
This story is apparently based off of observations made in june, when iCloud was first announced, and seems to concern just iMessage not the entirety of iCloud services. iCloud isn't even out yet, it's still in beta (real beta, not "Google beta".) As always without any kind of official confirmation or strong observable evidence this is just a rumor, but that won't stop everyone from reporting it as fact.
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"Lest you forget, MS kept Apple alive with a huge cash infusion when they were about to go under."
No, Apple was not about to go under. The $150 million was a token gesture of solidarity and it purchased non-voting shares. Apple had BILLIONS of dollars in the bank at the time. Apple was rudderless, which is what led to Jobs returning and reforging the sword that was broken, but Apple didn't need Microsoft's cash--they needed Office to be supported.
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.
Pretty much every statement in your post is completely made up whole cloth. The purpose of the data center has never been stated, whether it's ready has never been stated, MobileMe having "miserable failed" is far from true, and that they "completely stripped down their server OS" is both incorrect and wholly unrelated (Apple uses Sun and Oracle, among others, for their Internet servers).
And finally, that they are using MS and Amazon is completely, 100%, pure rumor based on a supposedly anonymous tip to a disreputable "news" organization.
It's not that this is impossible, far from it. But it's that it's simply a rumor from a single source, and a claim that would certainly need a bit more substantiation to believe.
Heh, looking at the way things go the "HP" stuff might keep running for longer than HP does ;)
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.
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*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.