Purely for themselves, or also for entering the cloud infrastructure market. In this day and age if you are big enough (Apple surely is) and happen to have superior server hardware it wouldn't really make sense to sell that hardware, you'd rather keep it and rent it out.
An Apple alternative to AWS would be interesting, but it would probably be heavily geared toward iOS and Mac app backends, with little flexibility outside those use cases. The Xcode integration would probably be amazing, though.
It's hard to imagine Apple really getting the cloud market, or their product offering would look like. Cloud by necessity has to be pretty agnostic and flexible to meet the diverse needs of customers. Apple hasn't really demonstrated an ability to succeed with this type of product, and leans heavily toward very tailored, limited, "apple knows best" types of products.
The cloud is changing. At my gig we've embraced GCP's managed cloud services, and I do not want to go back to 2015. The operating cost savings (no devops people!) and the low cost makes engineering systems for cloud-agnosticism very expensive. If Apple provided a range of managed services that met clients' needs, they could find a lot of success. Would they beat AWS? Highly doubtful, but Apple already provides a lot of cloud data services to Apple developers and consumers as part of iCloud.
I'm hopeful with respect to Apple dogfooding its silicon in the data center because it may feed back into robust ongoing support for Unix/Posix on their publicly-facing platforms.
> I'm hopeful with respect to Apple dogfooding its silicon in the data center because it may feed back into robust ongoing support for Unix/Posix on their publicly-facing platforms.
I mean that's one possibility, but what seems much more "Apple-ey" (aka likely) is that they would release a very much locked-down platform of tightly controlled, managed services which would perform well and would have a beautiful dashboard design, but would offer a small subset of the functionality which is available from AWS or GCP, they would make some weird choices - like only allowing Swift for configuration files - and all of this would be very proprietary in nature and distant from their consumer products.
That's not what I'm getting at. Regardless of the details of the cloud offerings, migrating from Linux to Apple Silicon would help the MacOS and iOS developer experience, because it'll all (MacOS, iOS, Apple's rack OS) be using their BSD-derived Unix OS under the covers.
Right now Apple's cloud engineers are to some extent helping Linux be a better OS by filing bug reports, creating PRs, etc. That activity, directed toward an Apple Silicon rack OS, would redound to those of us sitting behind MacBooks, typing into the terminal, treating it as a Unix box with nice driver support.
The question is whether you can make a competitive cloud infrastructure service without x86. Imagine that would be a nonstarter for a lot of the market, at least now.
arm in the cloud is already a thing. A lot of companies have been moving towards server-less infrastructure in the past few years, and I can't imagine it makes any difference at all for a large set of use-cases whether you're executing your 50-line go lambdas on x86 or arm.
The vast majority of the potential market is running somewhere between some and all of their stuff on x86 stuff in the cloud. Of course someone could launch an ARM-only cloud. They'd either be severely limiting their potential market, or they'd have to convince prospects to migrate to ARM. Certainly not impossible, but is it competitive?
What migration? Most of the code I have run in the cloud in the past 5 years has been in the form of managed services. I don't really know or care if AWS is running my code on ARM or x86.
