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I think with their recent hiring spree for core K8s contributors and another factor they may well do. It’s something they’ve dipped their toes into in the past
by AlphaSite 6y ago
I think with their recent hiring spree for core K8s contributors and another factor they may well do. It’s something they’ve dipped their toes into in the past for iCloud services.
If I remember correctly they previously bundled icloud services where each user got a slice of storage on the cloud, so I could see them extending that model to a time slice of compute as well, hosted on some form of K8s. I think the previous model was too limited for most use cases, but it’s not fundamentally broken.
I don’t think the economics of the M1 with 32+ cores make sense unless they go down the route of either build a cloud platform and amortise the cost of the chip design over a larger number of devices (or a chip let approach, but I’m not sure this matches their general design approach).
Also I’m pretty sure they think they have a competitive advantage over traditional x86 and ARM vendors so they’ll likely want to strike while that still holds.
- kbenson 6y ago> If I remember correctly they previously bundled icloud services where each user got a slice of storage on the cloud, so I could see them extending that model to a time slice of compute as well, hosted on some form of K8s. I think the previous model was too limited for most use cases, but it’s not fundamentally broken. The average Apple consumer customer can make plenty of use of cloud storage. What use does the average user have for cloud compute resources? Unless Apple starts offloading some processing to the cloud, and gives them some free, I'm not sure how regular users would use this, and offering it for free assuming the majority of people won't use it is just asking for some popular app to come along that takes advantage of that and screws up the economics. Not to mention people probably won't be happy to have a limit and pay for overage use for stuff that is likely provided by free on other platforms (if Google Photos prettifies your photos for free and Apple does it through metered compute with some given free, that's bad optics).