[mrweasel]

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?

[AJRF]

It runs macOS on QEMU on machines that use Intel Xeon Gold 5218's - https://twitter.com/KhaosT/status/1410332951963869185/photo/...

[oefrha]

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.

[Cthulhu_]

> 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.

[jbverschoor]

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.

[saagarjha]

It's macOS running in QEMU on commodity hardware.

[mrweasel]

Doesn’t that assume continued support for Intel CPUs? Once all the Macs are Apple Silicon they’d some else.

[saagarjha]

I’m sure Apple has no troubles building macOS for whatever platform they’d like.