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Comment by throwaway4good | Hacker News Reader

Makes you wonder what kind of hardware Apple is using for all their own cloud services (web, mail, messaging, icloud etc.).

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When I was there, a variety of brands of hardware, mostly running RHEL. In fact running OS-X in datacenters was verboten, and eventually limited to a couple of small racks running on their own network segments where you could put in a mac pro if desperately needed to.

Somewhat surprising since unlike their customers, there's no license restriction to Apple running macOS on different hardware. Maybe they didn't want to maintain a separate fork only for internal use. And having their own OS makes it more challenging to port apps to AWS/Azure.

The real question is how would this be beneficial to them? Almost everyone runs production systems on either Linux or Windows, so they would be an outlier, and the only one debugging and contributing to the operating system/libraries/etc.

I've read before on HN about people using Mac hardware in production, when they needed access to macOS graphics API, but since this only concerns a software implementation, and hardware was standard until M1 processors, it's reasonable to assume that Apple could port that part of OS to Linux, if they needed to use it from servers.

"Running OS-X in datacenters was verboten"

Why?

Maybe they didn't want to run into a tech debt thing of "we can't push this update to consumers even though it would cause no issues for them, because it would break X and Y on our backend servers and the two would have to diverge for some time until we come up with a fix."

I'm not an Apple insider, but I can imagine many reasons.

For one thing, the tcp stack is ancient, and easy to syn flood. (It was forked from FreeBSD in 2001ish, before FreeBSD added syncookies and syncache). Synflooding os x makes the whole network stack unresponsive, including other interfaces like localhost.

There was a time when they made this guys:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xserve

With their new CPUs maybe it is time to bring them back?

I mean surely they are not going to license Dell to put a M1 chip in a rackspace computer.

Considering how they've been making Mac servers more and more irrelevant, I wouldn't have my hopes up.

I remember when I worked at a startup and we were trying to get a team at Apple to purchase our SaaS product. They wanted the software hosted on a Mac, so we ran it on a Mini to demo. Also strange things like presenting them in Slides instead of Powerpoint. But this was also like 10 years ago.

That’s not strange at all. I use to teach fitness classes part time at Coke’s headquarters. We were told specifically not to bring in drinks or water bottles from competitors.

> We were told specifically not to bring in drinks or water bottles from competitors.

Ridiculous :-))

I was running OSX in a datacenter on campus, so I think you mean the huge server farms like where mesosphere etc were famously in play?

Apple has a self host cloud division as well as AWS according to news reports. Unclear if they run on Linux but it seems likely they must, even a bit if using AWS. Theoretically they could probably upload custom AMIs with macOS.

I don't believe its possible to get macOS (or atleast wasn't) onto an AMI in anyway.

I'd say it is possible to run Darwin on AWS, but I have never tried. FreeBSD runs well, so we know that any OS with drivers will boot on AWS.

They're Apple after all, so they can build macOS to boot from a standard environment - UEFI, kernel that doesn't check the copy prevention string on SMBIOS, etc.

Us, mere mortals, are more restricted, as we don't have the keys of the kingdom.

Apple uses GCP as well as AWS.

Don’t they use AWS like everyone else?

They used to rely heavily on AWS and Azure, but they've moved a lot in-house now.

Apple has been using GCP and AWS for years.

My understanding was they ditched Azure.

Big tech companies with large bandwidth requirements don’t use AWS.

Netflix doesn’t use AWS for video, Facebook doesn’t use AWS for most stuff, Google and Microsoft obviously don’t now because of competition but they didn’t before GCP and Azure were things.

I'm really curious what they use for their CI. Do they compile all of their iOS apps on Apple hardware? Or do they get the luxury of using proper server hardware and software?

Lots of Mac Pros, some virtual machines.

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