Anyway, I got thinking - a lot of folk are thinking that Apple's new datacentre will be all about data (especially media) in the cloud. But does anyone think that they might also be offering a compute cloud as well, a la Amazon's EC2?
Providing IT services and service level management is not one of Apple core competencies. Apple's internal folks don't do a reasonable job, but there is a difference between doing it for a single internal customer and doing it for a fee to anybody with money. Amazon started running webstores for other folks and providing back end API hooks into their systems so that businesss could also sell through Amazon's stores. That was part of the evolution of Amazon jumping into the cloud services business.
Apple running the iTunes store and .mac is not the same thing. Apple runs their own, private "cloud"/"grid"/whatever you want to call it. It is a different task to run one for other folks. For your own stuff you can profile it and can project what demands are going to be. If you open a grid for anybody with money you really don't know what kind of workload is going to show up. It means virtual machines along with dynamic storage and network management. When you do that well it looks from the outside like the business is all about just hooking machines into a network and flipping a switch. It isn't.
The new data center is Apple just catching up to where they should have been years ago. For a company with a heavy worldwide web presence the fact that they just had one single primary data center was a liability. Sure the new one is big but they are only on track to have just two. There are facetime call routing to do, itunes store , mobile me , ads , notification, potentially streaming music store, etc. etc. all with 20,000,000+ users. Just running Apple's back-end is going to take lots of room.
Apple has bought some folks to perhaps bring up their own mapping service. What they do with that will be very telling. Is that is going to be something brought inside and then can only get to from Apple software or is it going to be a general web service available to anyone's mashup ? Apple's history points to the former not the latter. So far Apple is a much bigger consumer of other people's web services than creators of them. That just points to what their core competencies are.
Apple may dip their toe in the services water with this online gaming thing. However, timesharing compute services, that is jumping into the deep end of the pool.
Would you use a Mac Pro in the cloud?
People already use colocation macs.
http://www.macminicolo.net/
http://www.xservhosting.com/
etc.
What haven't seen yet is someone with part time and/or metered services.
Techinically only Mac OS X Server license is clear cut on allowing virtual machines per copy. So it won't be cheap to start up.
What objections would there be (other than bandwidth clogging)...?
Depends upon how your data grows and shrinks. For instance send 400MB of data for analysis which gets sliced and diced into more data and then get your answers out , 10MB , then it isn't bad. If going to ship GBs up and GBs down then it is a problem.
