What are the unknown facts about Siri?
Apple details how it rebuilt Siri on Mesos – Mesosphere (April 2015):
- 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).
- Apple uses J.A.R.V.I.S. as its internal platform-as-a-service (similar in functionality to our open source Marathon framework) meaning it’s an easier way for Siri’s developers and engineers to deploy the services that the application needs to answer all those iOS users’ voice queries. (If it answers them badly, blame the algorithms not the infrastructure.)
- Apple’s Mesos cluster spans thousands of nodes — let’s assume many thousands — and runs about a hundred services that comprise Siri’s backend. It’s one of the largest Mesos clusters around.
- Siri stores data in HDFS.
- 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.
(Visited 26 times, 1 visits today)
