A few days ago I noticed a post in Tim O’Reilly’s twitter feed asking whether or not it would matter whether people ran a Mac or a PC once everyone had migrated to a cloud. Well, there are a few things about Mac OS X that make it fairly difficult to run in a cloud environment:
- EFI – Mac OS X doesn’t use a BIOS like most Operating Systems. This makes the bootup process fairly difficult in a distributed computing environment where the Guest OS would be OS X and the Host OS would be something else.
- Lack of Firepower – I love the Xserve. I always have. They’re some of the most beautiful rack mount servers you can get. But even an Octacore is gonna’ choke if you throw too many VMs on it. If I were architecting a large, distributed computing environment I would want some blades, an IBM Shark, etc. Having said this, Xgrid could pose an interesting option if VMware or Parallels were to allow distributed processing through it.
- Licensing – The Mac OS X Server software is the only software licensed for a cloud type of environment, if you read your EULA. This has only recently been introduced and has left Mac OS X without Xen or other open source alternatives in the virtualization space.
Having said all of this, Mac OS X is a wonderful system. There is a lot it has to offer and I, as much as anyone would like to see it capable of utilizing services like Amazon S3, but I would be on the lookout for some other strategic moves rather than a full-blown Mac OS X capable of running independently in a cloud environment. For example:
- Mac Backups to the Cloud – Time Machine, Bakbone, Atempo, Retrospect, etc. I cannot imagine that one of them will not be able to back up to Google or Amazon S3 at some point in the near future. GUI level support needs to be there for it to gain wide-scale adoption with the Mac user base (like using Backup.app to backup to MobileMe but with enough capacity to back up an Xsan and enough bandwidth to do full backups in less than 72 hours).
- Xgrid – There needs to be some kind of port of Xgrid to Amazon EC2 or support from render farm companies for EC2 or some other cloud/grid computing platform.
- Apple – The Pro Apps will need to support SaaS, Software + Services, etc. Many Apple users are leveraging Google Apps, but once it comes from Apple it will be legitimate.
So look for it. You’ll notice the companies that are really leveraging trends in IT as they come to market with products that allow the Mac to leverage the cloud. If Apple makes a push towards this then you’ll see more wide-scale adoption, but don’t expect much and you won’t risk getting too let down.
