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Siri, is it true that you're totally in love with Apache Mesos?

Open-source cluster is behind iThingies' voice queries

Apple’s digital assistant Siri is running on Apache Mesos, the cluster-manager billed by its creator as a data centre operating system.

This means the open-source project, which began life in 2009, is now powering voice queries on iPhone and iPad. Cupertino is believed to be running one the industry’s largest Mesos clusters, thousands of nodes that comprise the Siri back-end.

The consumer goods maker copped to running Mesos in a company blog post providing a rare insight into its computing guts.

Apple joins Twitter, Airbnb, Google, PayPal and OpenTable in running implementations of Mesos. It’s the brainchild of Benjamin Hindman, who created Mesos as part of his Ph.D thesis in 2009.

Mesos was submitted to Apache in 2010 while Hindman was scooped up to join Mesosphere, the VC-backed company building paid-for tools and plug ins for Mesos.

Apple is running an implementation of Mesos as a scheduler called Just A Rather Very Intelligent Scheduler (JARVIS) as a service for its own devs to write and deploy services used to answer iOS users Siri voice queries.

Apple's revealed it’s using Mesos in a San Francisco Bay Area project meet up.

In a Mesosphere company blog post, the firm said: “If Apple trusts Mesos to underpin Siri — a complex application that handles Apple-only-knows-how-many voice queries per day from hundreds of millions of iPhone and iPad users — that says a lot about how mature Mesos is and how ready it is to make a big impact in companies of all stripes.”

The idea of Mesos is you can build and run apps that write to Mesos rather than for individual operating systems, servers or other components of the data centre.

It’s multi language – written in C++, Python, Ruby, JVM and Go – with support for Hadoop, Spark, Storm and Cassandra, Chronos for distributed Cron and Docker containers.

Apple stores data in Siri on HDFS, the Hadoop distributed file system. ®

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