Apple’s engineers have revealed that its servers running Siri use open source software Apache Mesos.
In a meeting at Apple’s headquarters in California, the company’s engineers said that the solution was developed to make massive data centres more efficient and easier to manage.
Writing on the company blog, Derrick Harris, analyst and blogger at Mesosphere, revealed how Mesos also powers the platform-as-a-service JARVIS (Just A Rather Intelligent Scheduler). Harris highlights how Mesos makes it easier for Siri’s developers and engineers to deploy the services that the application needs to answer iOS users voice queries.
Running nearly a hundred services that comprise Siri’s backend, Apple’s Mesos cluster spans thousands of nodes, he explained.
The analyst revealed that Siri stores data in HDFS, with Siri’s Mesos moving away from “traditional” infrastructure. Apple’s work with Mesos and J.A.R.V.I.S. predates the open-sourcing of Marathon (by Mesosphere) and Apache Aurora (by Twitter) in 2013.
Mr Harris said: “Companies want what was promised from cloud computing but there hasn’t yet been a great way to get those things at scale in the cloud or in your own data centre. With Mesos, the world has an open source platform that truly delivers on promises of scalability, elasticity and shared resource pools.”
