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.
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.