Would you like to rule the world, Siri?

The question may be somewhat facetious, but the underlying infrastructure that currently runs the Apple-owned Siri artificial intelligence (AI) product could soon be powering the Apple cloud with a report Tuesday that the tech giant was looking to unify its various online services under the one platform.

Amir Efrati of The Information claims the new unified platform is based on open-source infrastructure software called Mesos, and will eventually see all of Apple’s service brought onto it; currently Apple web services such as iCloud and iTunes run of separate tech platforms.

The disparate and varied platforms currently running Apple’s services are a hangover from earlier days that saw silos around each Apple service, a policy that not only doesn’t translate well in the age of the cloud, but also one that causes issues with interoperability between each Apple product.

While the concept of a unified platform is a solid one, simply throwing various and sometimes even unrelated services onto the same platform isn’t always something that is easy to do; containers of sorts are said to be the aimed for solution with the new platform, with those containers able to run internet applications across an “orchestrated infrastructure” that delivers the ability to scale apps and to make changes changes to those very same apps on the fly.

Open source

Gone are the days of Apple relying only on its own designed technology alone, but the delivery of the new platform as open-source is an interesting move for Apple, but apparently not one without logic: according to Efrati it’s so Apple can attract open source engineers.

The company though is still struggling when it open source, with the report noting:

Apple sometimes requires engineers submitting code to open-source products to do so through a third party rather than let Apple be affiliated with the code. One person who’s been through the process says they felt that submitting code to an open-source project like Mesos or Hadoop is generally “frowned upon” by managers at Apple. But the process has gotten easier over time, people who have participated in the process say.

It’s not immediately clear how long it will take for Apple to move to unified cloud infrastructure but the report suggests that the implementation may take a considerable length of time given the vast differences across the array of Apple’s web-based services.

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