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At least when I used to work at Apple ~4 years ago, our internal clouds were nowhere near the robustness needed to open up to the public. Poor security/isolatio

At least when I used to work at Apple ~4 years ago, our internal clouds were nowhere near the robustness needed to open up to the public. Poor security/isolation controls, outages, clunky usage, etc. Apple's cloud software engineering muscle is fairly weak and providing an IaaS might be "easy" for the hardware side of the company, but very difficult for the software side.

Cheer2171 3y ago
But why couldn't they build out that capability? They could go on a hiring spree with all their cash and the state of the tech job market. Apple often goes into new market areas. Surely Apple is farther along in the cloud services game than they were in the VR game when they decided to go all-in into VR, or same for wearables, phones, music...
- jrockway 3y ago
  Does Apple want to spend a lot of money to be #5 in the cloud after AWS, GCP, Azure, and Oracle? Who is going to switch? I feel like all of the big spenders on those platforms are there because they got the best sales pitch (best basketball seats, best steak dinners, etc.) My last job was at a tiny startup for 4 software engineers and we picked AWS because of that. As the people using the platform, we hated AWS after they consistently messed up our account in every possible way despite paying $700/month for support... but they routinely took our sales team (???) out for dinner, so we never switched to GCP. (I used GCP at my next/current job and they are ... weird. But we used their managed K8s service in a very weird way and they were very supportive when we escalated things.)
  - latchkey 3y ago
    GCP is weird cause you're weird?
    - jrockway 3y ago
      OK I'm definitely weird and that's not Google's fault. Well, maybe a little. No, the support situation is weird. You have to have a contract with some third-party company, in our case, SADA. You then send all your support requests to them, and if they deem it necessary, they escalate it to Google. I feel like we always stumped them and then a person with a google.com email would be cc'd and instantly give us a good answer. SADA was very chill, though. Pretty competent in general except for their weird account enrollment system (which I had to deal with any time someone joined my team). The weird thing that we were doing was creating 100s of managed Kubernetes clusters a day. We make an open-source app that runs on Kubernetes and tried to have a cloud offering, and this provided the best isolation between customers. People would sign up, and then we built all the infrastructure for them from scratch. (The AWS way is to have the customer give you their AWS account ID, and then they would pay for all the infrastructure themselves. But for whatever reason, GCP didn't seem to have that option, and honestly our best customers were all too "new" to the cloud to have a routine AWS bill. So it worked for us, and whenever cluster creation was glitchy, GCP was happy to help us. What we were doing was unusual, but since we always paid on time, I guess, they were not mad about it or anything. I did offer to CC them on our cluster-creation monitoring alerts and they declined ;) Anyway, what I thought was weird was that with AWS, AWS is your support contract. With Google, it's some other company entirely. That'd kind of weird, right? You buy something from Vendor X and then when the product doesn't work, you talk to Vendor X. But with Google, we were too small potatoes for them to be worth talking to us for. But if something got escalated to them, they were very nice about it. (What's extra crazy to me is that I used to work on Google Fiber, and we had great support for people paying them much less than we were paying. Want to call someone and talk about how you're scared about viruses for 45 minutes? Google Fiber support would listen and assuage your fears, every single time. They were great people consistently doing a great job. Not sure why GCP didn't steal them!)
      - latchkey 3y ago
        When I call Visible (Verizon's own MVNO) for support, I don't get Verizon, I get someone in the Philippines that works for some company there, pretending to be Verizon. Same with Amazon or really any other major company these days. The weird thing here is that you dealt directly with SADA and knew that it was a third party. I actually see that as a good thing as it is more transparent.
- smoldesu 3y ago
  To expand on the other (excellent) comment; cloud profits are hard. Google Cloud only recently started turning a profit, and Microsoft's Azure purportedly doesn't make money at all. You'd be building up to compete with Amazon AWS and Oracle Cloud, both of whom are fierce competitors. Apple has already proven that they can build a server product, they just haven't figured out the "why" yet. Cloud customers are trying to buy low-margin compute with good support for their software. Apple is trying to sell high-margin compute with good support for their software. The indifference towards either party's needs damned Xserve from the start, and Apple would have to take a radically different approach if they want a shot at succeeding nowadays. Their hardware would be competing with Nvidia's enormous Grace servers and Ampere's dirt-cheap ARM vCPUs. Their software would probably be ignored unless it was Open Source. And all that begs the question - why bother? If Apple won't be making iPhone-sized hardware margins or getting Mac-level brand loyalty, they'd be spending money to undermine their core products. Comparatively, a VR headset that retreads the last decade of HMD tech a-la iPhone is a pretty safe bet.
lbourdages 3y ago
Was it based on Macs, or all Linux boxes?
Kinrany 3y ago
I wonder if Apple might want to do it because of this weakness. Build a new public cloud from scratch, feed it with money that comes from a new source, migrate internal services onto it once the public has tested it enough to fix most of the bugs.
bradknowles 3y ago
When I did a contract to deliver a Jenkins CI/CD server for Apple Retail Engineering, their entire internal cloud was basically just VMware running on the last full batch of Apple rack-mount XServe machines. So, not exactly something that I would consider competitive against the likes of Azure or AWS. In fact, AWS now sells services where you can bring your VMware internal clouds over to be officially supported by VMware on AWS.

Cheer2171 3y ago

But why couldn't they build out that capability? They could go on a hiring spree with all their cash and the state of the tech job market. Apple often goes into new market areas. Surely Apple is farther along in the cloud services game than they were in the VR game when they decided to go all-in into VR, or same for wearables, phones, music...

jrockway 3y ago
Does Apple want to spend a lot of money to be #5 in the cloud after AWS, GCP, Azure, and Oracle? Who is going to switch? I feel like all of the big spenders on those platforms are there because they got the best sales pitch (best basketball seats, best steak dinners, etc.) My last job was at a tiny startup for 4 software engineers and we picked AWS because of that. As the people using the platform, we hated AWS after they consistently messed up our account in every possible way despite paying $700/month for support... but they routinely took our sales team (???) out for dinner, so we never switched to GCP. (I used GCP at my next/current job and they are ... weird. But we used their managed K8s service in a very weird way and they were very supportive when we escalated things.)
- latchkey 3y ago
  GCP is weird cause you're weird?
  - jrockway 3y ago
    OK I'm definitely weird and that's not Google's fault. Well, maybe a little. No, the support situation is weird. You have to have a contract with some third-party company, in our case, SADA. You then send all your support requests to them, and if they deem it necessary, they escalate it to Google. I feel like we always stumped them and then a person with a google.com email would be cc'd and instantly give us a good answer. SADA was very chill, though. Pretty competent in general except for their weird account enrollment system (which I had to deal with any time someone joined my team). The weird thing that we were doing was creating 100s of managed Kubernetes clusters a day. We make an open-source app that runs on Kubernetes and tried to have a cloud offering, and this provided the best isolation between customers. People would sign up, and then we built all the infrastructure for them from scratch. (The AWS way is to have the customer give you their AWS account ID, and then they would pay for all the infrastructure themselves. But for whatever reason, GCP didn't seem to have that option, and honestly our best customers were all too "new" to the cloud to have a routine AWS bill. So it worked for us, and whenever cluster creation was glitchy, GCP was happy to help us. What we were doing was unusual, but since we always paid on time, I guess, they were not mad about it or anything. I did offer to CC them on our cluster-creation monitoring alerts and they declined ;) Anyway, what I thought was weird was that with AWS, AWS is your support contract. With Google, it's some other company entirely. That'd kind of weird, right? You buy something from Vendor X and then when the product doesn't work, you talk to Vendor X. But with Google, we were too small potatoes for them to be worth talking to us for. But if something got escalated to them, they were very nice about it. (What's extra crazy to me is that I used to work on Google Fiber, and we had great support for people paying them much less than we were paying. Want to call someone and talk about how you're scared about viruses for 45 minutes? Google Fiber support would listen and assuage your fears, every single time. They were great people consistently doing a great job. Not sure why GCP didn't steal them!)
    - latchkey 3y ago
      When I call Visible (Verizon's own MVNO) for support, I don't get Verizon, I get someone in the Philippines that works for some company there, pretending to be Verizon. Same with Amazon or really any other major company these days. The weird thing here is that you dealt directly with SADA and knew that it was a third party. I actually see that as a good thing as it is more transparent.
smoldesu 3y ago
To expand on the other (excellent) comment; cloud profits are hard. Google Cloud only recently started turning a profit, and Microsoft's Azure purportedly doesn't make money at all. You'd be building up to compete with Amazon AWS and Oracle Cloud, both of whom are fierce competitors. Apple has already proven that they can build a server product, they just haven't figured out the "why" yet. Cloud customers are trying to buy low-margin compute with good support for their software. Apple is trying to sell high-margin compute with good support for their software. The indifference towards either party's needs damned Xserve from the start, and Apple would have to take a radically different approach if they want a shot at succeeding nowadays. Their hardware would be competing with Nvidia's enormous Grace servers and Ampere's dirt-cheap ARM vCPUs. Their software would probably be ignored unless it was Open Source. And all that begs the question - why bother? If Apple won't be making iPhone-sized hardware margins or getting Mac-level brand loyalty, they'd be spending money to undermine their core products. Comparatively, a VR headset that retreads the last decade of HMD tech a-la iPhone is a pretty safe bet.

lbourdages 3y ago

Was it based on Macs, or all Linux boxes?

Kinrany 3y ago

I wonder if Apple might want to do it because of this weakness. Build a new public cloud from scratch, feed it with money that comes from a new source, migrate internal services onto it once the public has tested it enough to fix most of the bugs.

bradknowles 3y ago

When I did a contract to deliver a Jenkins CI/CD server for Apple Retail Engineering, their entire internal cloud was basically just VMware running on the last full batch of Apple rack-mount XServe machines. So, not exactly something that I would consider competitive against the likes of Azure or AWS. In fact, AWS now sells services where you can bring your VMware internal clouds over to be officially supported by VMware on AWS.