[skissane]

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]

They 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]

For 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/

[skissane]

I wonder if there is any chance we might see another Xserve?

If they’ve got Apple Silicon servers in their own data centres…

[therein]

They use Ubuntu on x86-64 servers, at least for iCloud. Backends for iCloud, Photos and Backups etc. are written in Java.

[Longhanks]

Any sources or more information on that?

[sillywalk]

They moved their password monitoring service from Java to Swift.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44172166

https://www.swift.org/blog/swift-at-apple-migrating-the-pass...

[twalla]

For 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]

NeXT 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.

[therein]

Unfortunately I am the source in this case. It is from having worked on them personally. :)