[rnantes]

I could see Apple come out with their own in-house Cloud Computing platform within the next 2 years.

- They would be vertically integrated with Apple Silicon

  - Apple themselves are increasingly depending on cloud services

  - Async/Await in Swift will likely land next year, making Server-Side Swift much more appealing

  - Apple is greatly increasing cloud / Kubernetes hires

  - Could share a single Apple Silicon ARM architecture from client(ios) to dev(mac) to cloud

[DaiPlusPlus]

> I could see Apple come out with their own in-house Cloud Computing platform within the next 2 years.

Apple, as a company, does not "do" long-term support; they're the anti-Microsoft when it comes to backwards compatibility. As soon as you start being an infrastructure service provider that means you HAVE to offer an LTSB branch of your OS, and Apple does not want to do that (and macOS has stagnated a lot since Apple devoted most of their OS engineering efforts to iOS). Apple doesn't offer a "real" server OS SKU at all (the "macOS Server" app package is for SOHO management, not for use as a high-availability application server OS).

...which means that Apple would have to provide an offering using Linux or BSD - such as a "naked" Darwin distro - but again, Apple does not want to have to support that, and I'm sure devs don't want to see the IaaS OS scene fragment further, and Darwin is far, far removed from being yet another Linux distro.

Amazon offers ARM cloud systems - why should Apple risk their profitability by competing in an arena that doesn't pose any risk to their bottom-line? And what do they have to gain?

[e40]

This is the fly in the oinment.

I would love to see Apple have an LTS branch of macOS, but I just don't see this happening. Too much would need to change in the company for that to happen.

From a macOS developer's standpoint, it's really a huge PITA there is no LTS. But, we adjust. Because we have a low-level product (compiler), we sometimes get into a situation where we need to sunset a product before we would normally do that, just because the older product doesn't run on the supported macOS versions. Doesn't happen often, but it does happen.

[madeofpalk]

I’m dubious. The only way I could see this happening is if it was some companion platform for iCloud/iOS apps. I just don’t understand what anyone has to gain from Apple making an “open” cloud platform.

[Aloha]

Apple however doesnt run on their own OS for their webservices though. Nothing in the way here, but just a note.

[dzhiurgis]

Makes sense if they start auditing / security reviewing of what gets pushed to their platform. Would be yet another Apple's security & privacy play.

Obviously would work as FaaS or PaaS.