

CloudKit JS - mindrun
https://developer.apple.com/icloud/index.html

======
sirn
The link to JavaScript reference is 404 right now, but after fiddling with the
URL a little bit, these seems to work:

CloudKit JS:
[https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/documenta...](https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/documentation/CloudKitJS/Reference/CloudKitJavaScriptReference/index.html)

CloudKit Web Services:
[https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/documenta...](https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/documentation/DataManagement/Conceptual/CloutKitWebServicesReference/Introduction/Introduction.html)

Edit: They've fixed the links.

~~~
untog
Heh. I'm happy to let other people try this out - iCloud hasn't exactly had
the best record for uptime and little things like this reinforce my worry that
Apple doesn't do backend services well.

That said, I look forward to being proven wrong.

~~~
MCRed
iCloud has better uptime than Amazon Web Services.

People bash Apple and iCloud and claim they can't do backend software, but
they ignore that iTunes has been trooping for over a decade under tremendous
load without a pickup. Contrast that with another store on the web-
Amazon.com-- which was (at the time I worked for Amazon) generally partially
down %40 of the time. (Though not all of it and it does a good job of faking
it when it is down.)

Look at AWS where companies like Netflix and Heroku have had days of outages
because the AWS network went down or whole datacenters were taken offline.

I've never seen that kind of an outage in iMessages or iCloud.

Apple just keeps trooping not making any noise because it's always working...
but because Apple's business model is selling hardware, and people give Amazon
a free pass for some reason (I mean why is AWS popular when it's down all the
time while Google is rock solid with its hosting services yet less popular?)

~~~
eclipxe
Every post you find a way to bash Amazon with half truths. It's really
tiresome and inaccurate.

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kojoru
If I'm reading correctly, that means I can build an app without any explicit
auth on OS X/iOS with backend which allows access to personal data via AppleID
username/password.

That's neat.

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meesterdude
This is great for some people, certainly. I won't knock it for people who's
lives are better with this.

But let's not kid ourselves. It's still their system; you're still playing by
their rules and doing things their way. Their history in this space is not
good at all. Maybe things have changed for the better; but it doesn't change
the fact that this only brings you deeper into their walled garden.

One of the reasons apple doesn't like the web is they can't make money from
them like they can from apps. Now, they have a way. They still have a bad
track record with infrastructure; numerous instances of failures, but I
imagine they're getting better.

Thanks, but no thanks.

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efsavage
Sorry Apple. You are many years of good behavior away from my trusting you
with this big a piece of my infrastructure.

~~~
MCRed
They have been providing rock solid internet infrastructure, and the tools for
it, going back to the acquisition of NeXT. WebOBjects, for instance, powered
Dell's online store, and selling direct was Dell's entire purpose of being in
business in the 1990s. It's been powering iTunes since 2003 or so with less
than a tenth as much downtime as Amazon Web Services... yet lots of people use
AWS.

~~~
skrebbel
I don't think the OP was talking about the _quality_ of the product.

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hamxiaoz
Is this something similar to parse/firebase?

~~~
nathan_f77
Yeah I heard that Apple considered buying Parse before deciding to build
CloudKit instead. It's a direct competitor, although Parse is still much
further ahead. CloudKit is a lot cheaper though.

~~~
dkyc
Parse was acquired by facebook more than two years ago (April 2013), so they
had to plan it for a long time then.

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jimmytidey
Free storage for 1PB - can that be right? Am I misunderstanding when I think
petabyte?

~~~
ceejayoz
There's a "Capacity scales with your users" section that says you have to have
10M active users for that.

~~~
calvin_c
Correct. You cannot just sign up and get a free 1 PM cloud storage account.
The more registered users you have, the more storage space you are allocated.
If you go over your allowed storage space you start moving into the paid tier.

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suninwinter
What are the chances Apple will pull your app if you start accessing these web
services from an Android app?

~~~
Jgrubb
Yesterday I'd have said 110%, but I dunno... I'm getting this dreamy feeling
that something wonderfully developer-friendly might be going on here. Not to
mention owning that infrastructure that let folks also -run- back Android apps
seems like it'd have value in itself, beyond just the dev PR.

------
lsllc
Powered by FoundationDB?

~~~
LunaSea
No it's powered by the tears of former FoundationDB clients that got fucked in
the process.

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aidos
When they say $100 per additional 10 reqs/s - do they mean each time you
exceed it?

~~~
ceejayoz
I'd guess it's billed monthly as
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burstable_billing](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burstable_billing)
so spikes don't kill you.

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brentm
I hope this is a precursor to Apple Pay on the web.

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joesmo
I assume the cost goes up with users but the js on this page doesn't work on
my kindle.

~~~
IanCal
It doesn't, apparently. The cost seems to be per-user, so

250MB asset storage / user

3MB database storage / user

50MB transfer / user

10 req/s per 100k users

is all free. I don't know how the requests part scales though, 10/s for 100k
users is each user hitting it once per 3 hours. I can't complain about the
amount given away for free, but I don't know quite how this would scale with
costs for different types of apps/loads.

