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Guess What: iCloud Uses Windows Azure Services For Hosting Data
- sandis 15y agoJust thinking – couldn't this be a temporary pre-launch solution because Apple's huge NC data center isn't fully operational yet?
- bkudria 15y agoAnd Apple is building Azure- or AWS-compatible APIs for iCloud to use in the new DC?
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- jemeshsu 15y agoMe think so. If not what's the point of a hugh data center?
- bengl3rt 15y agoProbably. But, in order to run on Azure, don't things have to be written in C#/.NET? That would suggest that their production stack will also leverage these technologies, potentially on windows (unless Mono over Linux or BSD is actually mature enough for this sort of thing, I wouldn't know)
- jasonlotito 15y ago> But, in order to run on Azure, don't things have to be written in C#/.NET? No, not at all. They also have support for Java, Ruby, and PHP.
- balakk 15y agoMore precisely, the Azure storage API is HTTP/REST-like. Hence it practically supports any language that has a HTTP stack.
- bengl3rt 15y agoI see. I mean, if they're just using the storage backend, I fully understand - they realize that solving the problem of storage provisioning and redundancy is not their core business, and that they should outsource it to somebody that's already very good at it.
- rksprst 15y agoNo, you can actually run Ruby on Rails, and other languages on Azure. That's a goal for them, actually. It's not only access to the storage API.
- sriramk 15y agoTo be clearer, Windows Azure can run any code that can run on Windows. So if you have x86/x64 code that runs in a Win2k8 OS, you're good to go. And most languages can do that, some with Cygwin. The major ones (Java, PHP, Python, Ruby, Erlang, etc) have phenomenal Windows support out of the box. For this next bit, see my disclaimer below. The blog post mentions windows.net. That is the domain for the Windows Azure storage services (blobs, tables, queues, etc). In specific, the headers mentioned seem consistent with a storage request made to the blob service. Disclaimer: I used to work on Windows Azure until a few weeks ago on strategic adoption among other things so I have to put this here. This is no comment on whether the OP's blog post is accurate or not, on any Apple-Microsoft relationship, etc.
- darkxanthos 15y agoYou can just shell out to another process.
- neuroelectronic 15y agoBuilding a datacenter doesn't make you a datacenter expert. I'm not saying that Apple can't do it, just that they're not going to be able to do it as well as Windows or Amazon.
- rbanffy 15y ago> Building a datacenter doesn't make you a datacenter expert Actually, you should hire experts before building the datacenter
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- bonch 15y agoWhile this may just be temporary, I don't see why it would matter if it wasn't. Apple probably also uses Linux and FreeBSD for things.
- josephcooney 15y agoAgree. Even though Apple have their own data-centres, they might use some Amazon or MS capacity just as a redundancy hedge.
- karl11 15y agoWouldn't this make a successful iCloud even more embarrassing for Microsoft? They have the technology, but can't market it or make it easy for consumers to use?
- jharrison 15y agoAnd how bad would it be if it wasn't so successful? Apple gets to point fingers at Microsoft for not being able to keep up if things go south.
- pyre 15y agoThat would only matter if Apple was having infrastructure problems. If people just didn't want the product, those claims wouldn't make sense.
- varikin 15y agoFrom a logical standpoint, you are correct. From a marketing or political (business, no government politics), Apple could blame Microsoft for iCloud failing, regardless of the truth, to a point. To put it another way, I frequently tell people "Businesses choose Java because if it fails, it isn't because they choose Java." This means that if the Director of IT says to build with the industry standard of Java (or .Net), it is not the Directors fault if/when the project fails. The project manager, the developers, QA, middle management, etc failed to do it correctly. It is a safe choice since it is industry standard and thus well proven. If it takes longer and costs more, it means it was a much more difficult problem then they expected, but since they used Java they got it working. If on the other hand, they went with Rails/Django/Node.js/Erlang/NoSQL/etc, and it fails, the Director chose to use "new and untested" technologies, he/she is the root cause. Regardless of the fact that it could just be that realistic goals/management were never used. I am not trying to say Azure is industry standard or the safe choice, but the way to shift blame is the same.
- felipemnoa 15y agoConsidering the amount of none trivial work about having to port your apps from one Rails version to the next I would be surprised if the Director didn't get part or most of the blame for forcing them to use Rails. And saying that they could just stay in an old version is not valid. When bugs are discovered in the old version most likely they will not be fixed because everybody has already moved on. Enterprise projects already have a high rate of failure and building it on a platform that has a history of making substantial changes on every new version is a really, really bad idea. An honest risk analysis of the enterprise project would raise a huge red flag for using a technology that continues to change substantially in every version such that it is not backwards compatible.
- dexen 15y agoWasn't the big idea of cloud that you aren't tied to provider and can move your services anywhere? Anyway, what other big cloud providers are out there -- ones that aren't direct competitors to Apple? Amazon's AWS is out of the question, as Amazon competes directly on those hot multimedia and e-book markets with Apple. Google's stuff, too, as Google is a major competitor on mobile and multimedia markets. Microsoft doesn't seem to directly compete with Apple in the hot markets -- at least not until they squeeze some Windows Phones from Nokia.
- patrickaljord 15y agoRead the article, it says it uses AWS too...
- geuis 15y agoDoes it really matter what cloud services Apple uses? Yes, they have their own data centers but why should it be surprising if they also utilize others as well? Microsoft is, in many ways, lots of little companies that all live together. If the Azure business unit makes money from Apple, it doesn't really matter if the Windows Live teams are failing in their products. The oft-mentioned great thing about cloud services is not having to worry about managing hardware. Leave that to the people that are really good at it, and build your business on top.
- kenjackson 15y agoThis is a win all the way around. Azure needs customers and who better than Apple to stress it and force them to make it better. But I'd hate to be the Azure VP if Jobs calls you because something isn't to his liking. At the same time Apple wins because they can focus on their core competency, UX, not cloud plumbing. Is Apple or Samsung embarrassed because the chips, flash, and display are sourced from Samsung? Of course not. Samsung is proud that their parts are the ones Apple choose, and Apple sells the experience, not a collection of parts.
- ZeroGravitas 15y agoApple often removes any mention of the suppliers on the chips, sometimes cheekily putting Apple logos on chips bought from others, so they appear to be somewhat embarrassed about it. Similarly, Samsung seemed a trifle embarrassed when announcing that their Galaxy S II phone would ship in some territories with Tegra 2 chips rather than their own Exynos chips.
- Refringe 15y agoI'm nitpicking, but I wouldn't say Apple "removes" the logos, just special orders the chips with their logo instead.
- saetaes 15y agoThis seems to be a logical multi-vendor play to me. Especially if Apple's data centers aren't geographically distributed, it needs to get other vendors involved.
- gfodor 15y agoI think there's more to the story here because otherwise there was no point to Apple building the data centers.
- SoftwareMaven 15y agoI don't think the implication is that Apple has none of its own infrastructure, just that they've bought some pieces from third parties.
- varunsrin 15y agohttp://gigaom.com/2011/06/10/apple-icloud-microsoft-azure-amazon/ http://gigaom.com/2011/06/10/apple-icloud-microsoft-azure-am... This article from GigaOm explains it better - Apple is likely using Azure / AWS as a CDN, because their data centers are centrally located (however this is not fact - we still don't know the extent to which they leverage azure / aws) I think its a win-win for everyone involved - Azure makes money, and bags a high profile customer which validates their platform. Apple can leverage Azure's distributed datacenters to deliver a great experience for their users. If this is true, I wouldn't say that it was embarrassing for Microsoft - much like how Google Maps on the iPhone is valuable asset for Google , not an embarrassment.
- flocial 15y agoWindows Azure can be a number of things. Since they use AWS and the article shows http requests they might be using it as just a blob store or CDN with redundancy across providers. I doubt they're running Windows Azure on their servers not that it wouldn't be pragmatic to.
- mamp 15y agoI imagine the SVP for cloud computing at Apple is happy to pay for highly redundant services so he doesn't invoke the Wrath of Jobs (TM). Steve Jobs probably pushed for multi-vendor redundancy so he could confidently say at the keynote that they stuffed up the Mobile Me launch, but wouldn't make the same mistake.
- glassx 15y agoYour reply makes a lot of sense, considering we had a major Amazon outage just a few months ago. Redundancy is the way to go.
- tlrobinson 15y agoWait, so what was that billion dollar data center [1] Apple built in North Carolina for? [1] http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/02/apples-nc-data-center-coming-online-this-spring.ars http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/02/apples-nc-data-cen...
- bane 15y agoDidn't Apple just build a couple huge data centers? I was under the assumption they were supposed to be for iCloud?
- webXL 15y agoPerhaps they have a bunch of windows servers inside, but why windows.net?
- sriramk 15y agowindows.net is the root URL for all the Windows Azure storage services. Back in 2008, we knew that Windows Azure was going to have the 'Windows' part of it's name. Since Microsoft already owned windows.net, this made it an obvious choice. So we get blob.core.windows.net, database.windows.net, etc.
- j_baker 15y agoPerhaps they haven't gotten all of said data centers live yet and needed to use Azure and AWS as a temporary measure.
- galvan 15y agohttp://xkcd.com/908/ http://xkcd.com/908/
- signa11 15y agoi think this is all based on the VL2 paper, described here: http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2009/10/05/VL2AScalableAndFlexibleDataCenterNetwork.aspx http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2009/10/05/VL2AScalableAndF... and the paper available here: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.156.6990&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.156.... it boasts of some freakishly fast ability to shuffle 2.7Tb between 75 servers in 27 seconds...
- ch0wn 15y agoEmbarrassment or not, I'm surprised by that. This is a big deal and the first time we hear about it is after someone took a closer look at the headers.
- some1else 15y agoMicrosoft.com purportedly uses Akamai(Linux) for load-balancing and caching their websites[1]. I don't see anything wrong with using appropriate technologies. [1] http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2003/08/17/wwwmicrosoftcom_runs_linux_up_to_a_point_.html http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2003/08/17/wwwmicrosoftcom...
- jpalomaki 15y agoRelaying on their own data centers and their own cloud stuff would have created a dependency between iCloud and the data center level stuff. If the data center project would have been delayed for a reason or another.. too bad for the iCloud. Also it might not be a good idea to start testing your inhouse cloud infrastructure with a high profile product like iCloud that is likely to attract quite a few users in coming months. I think it absolutely makes sense to do the development and initial launch with outside services and then later on maybe migrate to your own data centers and own cloud stack.
- mrich 15y agoI find it funny how everybody here tries to spin this to portray Apple in a positive light, even putting the blame on Microsoft somehow. Face it, this would be a big deal for any other large company. When a tech giant builds his latest project on out-of-house infrastructure, how can this be good? At best, it is a waste of development resources (when it is temporary), At worst, it is a business risk/reliability nightmare waiting to happen (when this is their final infrastructure).
- mechanical_fish 15y agoYou are aware that Apple doesn't own its own chip fabs? That its hardware is manufactured for it by third parties? That the building space for most Apple Stores are leased from malls and landlords? Every enterprise builds on infrastructure owned by others. That is what contracts are for. What matters is the degree of lock-in and who controls the roadmap. And the whole point of modern "cloud" infrastructure is that you don't own the hardware, you don't have the capital costs of the datacenters, you have a nice temporary lease that you can nonrenew or perhaps even break if needed, and your internal architecture is probably generic enough to be ported to another cloud if needed.