Azure doesn't run on Windows. Why would iCloud run on MacOS? There's exactly one organization in the world that needs to run iCloud, why would MacOS target that use case? I doubt Apple eats their own dogfood.

Azure does run on Windows. It's HyperV server below the rest of the hardware. It's a custom Windows install that you can't purchase, but it's Windows none the less.

That's interesting. Do you have a public source for this handy?

I remember seeing an article [1] proclaiming that more than 50% of Azure's workloads are on Linux, so I'm guessing their hypervisors are running an optimised Linux kernel somewhat.

1: Linux is Most Used OS in Microsoft Azure – over 50 percent of VM cores

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23156222

You can see it mentionned on this page: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/security/fundamental...

Interesting language, "more than 50%". I guess the real number doesn't look good for marketing.

that 50% is the guests, not the hosts... I think they even have Hyper-V, along with the Windows Server Kernel, running on ARM, since they now have ARM VMs... Only a matter of time before thats released in the wild... [1][https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-virtual-machine...]

Azure Devops Services is an updated version of their old Team Foundation Server stuff. You can't create projects, teams, or workitem areas/iteration paths that are any of the microsoft magic names ( con, nul, ...etc... ), presumably because they store the data on a windows drive and it would implode. git repos, too, but that's just good planning for any git service since allowing microsoft reserved names would make the repo unclonable to microsoft systems.

> are they running them on some off-the-shelf Macs like they expect everyone else to do?

No. Last time I poked into Xcode Cloud, it was running on Ice Lake server Xeons, which didn't ship on any Mac.