The first steps to Apple’s AWS competitor. Their multi billion contract with Amazon will end soon, so the timing makes perfect sense.
Apple is very unlikely to build a “general cloud” offering. This is built and sold on differentiated services (eg BigQuery, Lambda, Kinesis), not on undifferentiated compute units (ie Apple Silicon even if it is slightly cheaper for the raw hardware).
Meanwhile, every time a developer uses local inference with CoreML, that competes directly with AWS’ revenue.
Apple’s “cloud” offering will be hosted in people’s pockets, powered by electricity consumers pay for, and hardware that Apple sells for a fat profit. And they will keep empowering developers to move more compute over to “the client”.
e.g. I can see Apple building a framework for “isomorphic” Apps. Where the front end in SwiftUI and backend in SwiftStateful (a hypothetical framework for permissions/auth and connecting to cloud databases) compiled and deployed to CF Workers or some other edge deployed service.
I think they might even take this one step further and make some future version of MacStudio+WiFi that downloads and executes CFs Workers. If they went this route, it’s unclear if they’d need or want a partner like CF just to deploy and cache the workers.
Disclaimer: I have an investment in Cloudflare. I have no real idea about anything really.
Apple Silicon is so much more efficient on the desktop, and an AWS competitor might make it worthwhile to consider using aarm64 containers end-to-end. That would be amazing.
No wait ECS does support it already: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonECS/latest/userguide/ecs-a...
The lack of an ongoing free tier also softly implies that they are being charged upstream.
You would assume macOS as the operating system, but is that manageable at that scale? Maybe it runs on Linux and cross-compiles? Apple do run their own data-centers, which I assume all run Linux. If there was some headless macOS version and data-center wide management framework for it, I suspect that we would have heard about it. If the Xcode Cloud runs on macOS, does that mean that Apple have some rack mounted servers based on the M1/M2 processors?
Sure, it's a unix system. You can go far with SSHing into a machine and running some commands. Also, they only very recently discontinued MacOS Server (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208312)
Hardware-wise, it's either a battery of Mac Minis or Mac Pros, or maybe they've made custom hardware so they can put Apple hardware in a blade server form factor.
All the cloud providers create custom rack servers and even silicon, so why wouldn't they have rack mounted Mx boards? Also, the Mx gives you a lot of power for per watt. Perfect use case of a DC.
They’re spending 10B between 2018 and 2023 to build datacenters in the US.
They’ve been a big customer on all cloud platforms (learning). The last contract with aws is worth at least 1.5b (300m/year but growing since 2018) and ends in about 1.5 year.
Seems like a good place to save billions, and make some more by offering cloud services on efficient systems.
And they've been hiring a lot of infra people since 2020