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Does Apple use macOS in servers in its datacentres? Or are they all Linux? Surely at a minimum they need macOS for CI. Apple does have one advantage here-they
by skissane 9mo ago
Does Apple use macOS in servers in its datacentres? Or are they all Linux?
Surely at a minimum they need macOS for CI.
Apple does have one advantage here-they can legally grant themselves permission to run macOS internally on non-Apple hardware, and I don’t believe doing so legally obliges them to extend the same allowance to their customers.
But that might give them a reason to keep x86_64 alive for internal use, since that platform (still) gives you more options for server-class hardware than ARM does
- jabwd 9mo agoThey do run Apple Silicon in data centers, so perhaps another custom version of Darwin + their system frameworks. It is hard to tell without some leaks :)
- glhaynes 9mo agoFor Private Cloud Compute: “a new operating system: a hardened subset of the foundations of iOS and macOS tailored to support Large Language Model (LLM) inference workloads while presenting an extremely narrow attack surface.” https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/ https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/
- skissane 9mo agoI wonder if there is any chance we might see another Xserve? If they’ve got Apple Silicon servers in their own data centres…
- therein 9mo agoThey use Ubuntu on x86-64 servers, at least for iCloud. Backends for iCloud, Photos and Backups etc. are written in Java.
- Longhanks 9mo agoAny sources or more information on that?
- twalla 9mo agoFor the Java bit at least, this aligns with job descriptions I’ve seen and recruiter outreach I’ve received (long time ago though, maybe 5 years).
- pjmlp 9mo agoNeXT added a Java variant to WebObjects and it was for several years the main server side infrastructure, after being acquired by Apple. Nowadays you can usually still find Java and JVM languages like Clojure (Apple Maps), on Apple's job ads. How much of it is still Java based, no idea. I imagine XCode Cloud has nothing to with it for example.
- sillywalk 9mo agoThey moved their password monitoring service from Java to Swift. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44172166 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44172166 https://www.swift.org/blog/swift-at-apple-migrating-the-password-monitoring-service-from-java/ https://www.swift.org/blog/swift-at-apple-migrating-the-pass...
- therein 9mo agoUnfortunately I am the source in this case. It is from having worked on them personally. :)