Have you ever wondered how Google manages to handle 40,000 Macs without any help from Apple?
Google engineers Clay Caviness and Edward Eigerman reported that Apple doesn’t care much of supporting its management tools
Have you ever wondered how Google manages to handle 40,000 Macs without any help from Apple? As you might remember, earlier this month, there was a conference of LISA’13 that took place in Washington and members from Google Macintosh Operations shared that they were forced to develop their own tool in order to handle an army of approximately 43,000 Macs. Google engineers Clay Caviness and Edward Eigerman reported that Apple doesn’t care much of supporting its management tools but yet the tools are out there to keep your devices secured and updated. In fact, Apple has procudes only Mac OS X server and Apple Remote Desktop and they haven’t had a major revision since 2006. In order to avoid these issues, the Google team took things into their own hands by developing their own tools set to handle configuration, package management, monitoring system levels and everything else. If you look at the chart from the picture, the red line represents the release of Apple’s iPhone while nothing comes after 2006 for Apple’s remote desktop.
Meanwhile, Google announced they’ve been developing the CanHazimage that will soon roll out. Basically, this is a technology that is taking Apple’s system image in order to apply a set of packages to that image which leads to the creation of image. Another tool in development is Cauliflower Vest that is also an open-source tool, which assists administrators to enable FileVault 2 as well as the escrowing of keynote tokens.
Unlike Apple, Google supports four desktop platforms that include Linus, Chrome OS, Windows and OS X and these days they’re about to use a platform different than the Mac OS X. The team also managed to update Mac from 10.7 to 10.8 for 99.5% for only 8 weeks and it’s currently working on 10.9 Mavericks.
In the end, Apple’s success might have a lot to do with all of this.
Source: The Register