Apple Details How It Rebuilt Siri on Apache Mesos

Yet another sign of a more open Apple — Siri engineers spoke in public about the third-generation (and as I noted a few months ago, much improved) back-end for Siri. Some notes from Derrick Harris, writing for the Mesosphere blog:

  • Apple’s custom Mesos scheduler is called J.A.R.V.I.S., which is short for Just A Rather Very Intelligent Scheduler. It’s named after Tony Stark’s intelligent computer assistant in the Iron Man movies (and technically, I’m told, his human butler in the old comic books). […]

  • Siri’s Mesos backend represents its third generation, and a move away from “traditional” infrastructure. Apple’s work with Mesos and J.A.R.V.I.S. predates the open-sourcing of Marathon (by Mesosphere) and Apache Aurora (by Twitter) in 2013.

  • Not only has Mesos helped make Siri scalable and available on the infrastructure front, it has also improved latency on the app itself.

It really does show, and it matters. Siri’s performance and reliability are essential to the Apple Watch experience.

★ Wednesday, 29 April 2015