Apple took the first steps to an AWS competitor in 2010 when it started working on phone CPUs.
Apple is very unlikely to build a “general cloud” offering. This is built and sold on differentiated services (eg BigQuery, Lambda, Kinesis), not on undifferentiated compute units (ie Apple Silicon even if it is slightly cheaper for the raw hardware).
Meanwhile, every time a developer uses local inference with CoreML, that competes directly with AWS’ revenue.
Apple’s “cloud” offering will be hosted in people’s pockets, powered by electricity consumers pay for, and hardware that Apple sells for a fat profit. And they will keep empowering developers to move more compute over to “the client”.
I think that IF they were to do any kind of cloud offering, it would be services for apps - storage like Firebase, push notifications, analytics, in-app purchase management, that kind of thing.
My guess, they’ll contract this out to a player like Cloudflare (like with iCloud relay).
e.g. I can see Apple building a framework for “isomorphic” Apps. Where the front end in SwiftUI and backend in SwiftStateful (a hypothetical framework for permissions/auth and connecting to cloud databases) compiled and deployed to CF Workers or some other edge deployed service.
I think they might even take this one step further and make some future version of MacStudio+WiFi that downloads and executes CFs Workers. If they went this route, it’s unclear if they’d need or want a partner like CF just to deploy and cache the workers.
Disclaimer: I have an investment in Cloudflare. I have no real idea about anything really.
Apple Silicon is so much more efficient on the desktop, and an AWS competitor might make it worthwhile to consider using aarm64 containers end-to-end. That would be amazing.
I'm not sure what I'm missing, but don't most cloud providers have ARM instances these days? We've been running most of our stuff on Graviton processors on AWS for some time now and it is a nice cost savings.
It’s not just a matter of ISA, Apple’s CPUs are significantly more performant in a number of ways compared to other ARM CPUs on the market at the moment.
The pricing is in compute hours, which means that their app-integrated CI/CD offering directly competes with offerings that require you to purchase your own retail-rate AWS EC2 &co compute hours.
That sort of raises the question: What does Xcode Cloud run on?
You would assume macOS as the operating system, but is that manageable at that scale? Maybe it runs on Linux and cross-compiles? Apple do run their own data-centers, which I assume all run Linux. If there was some headless macOS version and data-center wide management framework for it, I suspect that we would have heard about it. If the Xcode Cloud runs on macOS, does that mean that Apple have some rack mounted servers based on the M1/M2 processors?
Folks at e.g. MacStadium has been managing Mac minis (running macOS) at scale for a very long time. AWS also entered the space ~2 years ago. Of course Apple can do it themselves, and more efficiently.
> You would assume macOS as the operating system, but is that manageable at that scale?
Sure, it's a unix system. You can go far with SSHing into a machine and running some commands. Also, they only very recently discontinued MacOS Server (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208312)
Hardware-wise, it's either a battery of Mac Minis or Mac Pros, or maybe they've made custom hardware so they can put Apple hardware in a blade server form factor.
Darwin is headless. But maybe they're running asahi, although I doubt it. To run nodes, you don't actually need a complete distribution..
All the cloud providers create custom rack servers and even silicon, so why wouldn't they have rack mounted Mx boards? Also, the Mx gives you a lot of power for per watt. Perfect use case of a DC.
They have built a few datacenters around the globe.
They’re spending 10B between 2018 and 2023 to build datacenters in the US.
They’ve been a big customer on all cloud platforms (learning). The last contract with aws is worth at least 1.5b (300m/year but growing since 2018) and ends in about 1.5 year.
Seems like a good place to save billions, and make some more by offering cloud services on efficient systems.
And they've been hiring a lot of infra people since 2020
Apple is very unlikely to build a “general cloud” offering. This is built and sold on differentiated services (eg BigQuery, Lambda, Kinesis), not on undifferentiated compute units (ie Apple Silicon even if it is slightly cheaper for the raw hardware).
Meanwhile, every time a developer uses local inference with CoreML, that competes directly with AWS’ revenue.
Apple’s “cloud” offering will be hosted in people’s pockets, powered by electricity consumers pay for, and hardware that Apple sells for a fat profit. And they will keep empowering developers to move more compute over to “the client”.