Apple has hired multiple well-known software engineers with cloud computing expertise in recent months, according to a report from tech site Protocol.
The range of employees Apple has hired has created "a stir" in the "tight-knit cloud community," and is a sign that Apple is perhaps planning to build serious cloud infrastructure to compete with Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.
Employees have expertise in containers and Kubernetes. Michael Crosby, for example, known as one of the engineers of containers as they exist today, joined Apple in 2020. Arun Gupta, who worked at Amazon Web Services, joined Apple in February and is leading Apple's open source efforts. Another former AWS employee who worked on managed container services, Maksym Pavlenko, has also transitioned to Apple. Francesc Campoy, an ex-Google employee, is now at Apple working on Kubernetes, an open source container orchestration platform that allows for managing containerized applications across hosts.
Apple has also listed multiple job postings that suggest it is working on new tools for its internal software development teams.
Apple already has a huge cloud-based platform that encompasses iCloud, the App Store, Apple TV+, Apple Music, and more, but it is not up to par with the cloud technology used by companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Netflix.
Apple in 2018 announced plans to invest $10 billion in data center construction, and in 2019, joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation that hosts Kubernetes and containers.
