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Guess What: iCloud Uses Windows Azure Services For Hosting Data

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Re: Guess What: iCloud Uses Windows Azure Services For Hosting Data

#41

Post by varikin »

pyre wrote: post #36
jharrison wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how bad would it be if it wasn't so successful? Apple gets to point fingers at Microsoft for not being able to keep up if things go south.

That would only matter if Apple was having infrastructure problems. If people just didn't want the product, those claims wouldn't make sense.

From a logical standpoint, you are correct. From a marketing or political (business, no government politics), Apple could blame Microsoft for iCloud failing, regardless of the truth, to a point.

To put it another way, I frequently tell people "Businesses choose Java because if it fails, it isn't because they choose Java." This means that if the Director of IT says to build with the industry standard of Java (or .Net), it is not the Directors fault if/when the project fails. The project manager, the developers, QA, middle management, etc failed to do it correctly. It is a safe choice since it is industry standard and thus well proven. If it takes longer and costs more, it means it was a much more difficult problem then they expected, but since they used Java they got it working.

If on the other hand, they went with Rails/Django/Node.js/Erlang/NoSQL/etc, and it fails, the Director chose to use "new and untested" technologies, he/she is the root cause. Regardless of the fact that it could just be that realistic goals/management were never used.

I am not trying to say Azure is industry standard or the safe choice, but the way to shift blame is the same.

Re: Guess What: iCloud Uses Windows Azure Services For Hosting Data

#42

Post by cageface »

dillona wrote: post #40
cageface wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes sense for Apple to outsource this but I wonder if this is going to limit them down the road. I think Google has a tremendous advantage with their in-house expertise and infrastructure here. My instinct is that it's harder to get that right in the long run than it is to build acceptably user-friendly interfaces. The real connaisseur may continue to prefer Apple UI but Google's good enough for the rest and I w…

There is opensource software (via OpenStack) to run a distributed blob store like this at scale. My guess is Apple just doesn't want the hassle of dealing with it and/or this is temporary while they get their hardware set up

That's like saying that Google's prowess with map-reduce is irrelevant because we also have Hadoop. This stuff is very hard to get right and nobody does it better than Google.

Re: Guess What: iCloud Uses Windows Azure Services For Hosting Data

#47

Post by j_baker »

statictype wrote: post #30
karl11 wrote: post #5

Wouldn't this make a successful iCloud even more embarrassing for Microsoft? They have the technology, but can't market it or make it easy for consumers to use?

Of course not. It's akin to saying any successful Rails app is an embarrassment to 37signals because they had the technology to create it but didn't.

Yes, in the land where everyone is logical and only makes decisions based on pure reason, that's true. But on planet earth, people act irrationally.

From a strictly logical sense, it's meaningless. But symbolically, it says a lot. The fact that Microsoft failed at something and then got bested by someone using their technology is symbolic of how far Microsoft has fallen.

Re: Guess What: iCloud Uses Windows Azure Services For Hosting Data

#48

Post by j_baker »

bane wrote: post #44

Didn't Apple just build a couple huge data centers? I was under the assumption they were supposed to be for iCloud?

Perhaps they haven't gotten all of said data centers live yet and needed to use Azure and AWS as a temporary measure.

Re: Guess What: iCloud Uses Windows Azure Services For Hosting Data

#49

Post by felipemnoa »

varikin wrote: post #41
pyre wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would only matter if Apple was having infrastructure problems. If people just didn't want the product, those claims wouldn't make sense.

From a logical standpoint, you are correct. From a marketing or political (business, no government politics), Apple could blame Microsoft for iCloud failing, regardless of the truth, to a point. To put it another way, I frequently tell people "Businesses choose Java because if it fails, it isn't because they choose Java." This means that if the Director of IT says to build with the industry standard of Java (or .Net)…

Considering the amount of none trivial work about having to port your apps from one Rails version to the next I would be surprised if the Director didn't get part or most of the blame for forcing them to use Rails. And saying that they could just stay in an old version is not valid. When bugs are discovered in the old version most likely they will not be fixed because everybody has already moved on. Enterprise projects already have a high rate of failure and building it on a platform that has a history of making substantial changes on every new version is a really, really bad idea.

An honest risk analysis of the enterprise project would raise a huge red flag for using a technology that continues to change substantially in every version such that it is not backwards compatible.

Re: Guess What: iCloud Uses Windows Azure Services For Hosting Data

#50

Post by sriramk »

webXL wrote: post #46
bane wrote: post #44

Didn't Apple just build a couple huge data centers? I was under the assumption they were supposed to be for iCloud?

Perhaps they have a bunch of windows servers inside, but why windows.net?

windows.net is the root URL for all the Windows Azure storage services. Back in 2008, we knew that Windows Azure was going to have the 'Windows' part of it's name. Since Microsoft already owned windows.net, this made it an obvious choice. So we get blob.core.windows.net, database.windows.net, etc.
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