Report: Apple to unify cloud services backend with new ‘Pie’ platform, will move all employees into one campus

Apple will unify its cloud service teams to improve product development and software quality, according to a new report by Bloomberg. Currently, employees that develop Internet services like Siri, Maps, iCloud, News and Apple Pay are housed in many different buildings mostly outside of the main Infinite Loop campus.

To improve collaboration and speed up product development, Apple will be moving all the relevant teams into the Infinite Loop buildings. This ultimately leads to a better services division, which is the leading source of revenue growth for the company. It is also unifying web products to run on a new backend, codenamed ‘Pie’ …

Apple is able to bring engineers and managers from these various teams into 1 Infinite Loop as other employees will move into the new Apple Campus 2 which is nearing completion. When the new campus opens, Apple will not be shuttering the existing Infinite Loop buildings. Apple will instead double its own campus size and reduce its reliance on rented buildings across Cupertino.

The Bloomberg report says most executives want to move their divisions into the spaceship campus but Cue believes that the Internet Services division will function better if everyone working on Apple cloud services is brought into Infinite Loop.

The original documents said Apple wanted to move up to 13,000 employees into Apple Campus 2. The report claims Apple has upwardly revised this estimate by ‘thousands’, so the company is adjusting its interior office designs to accommodate more people.

Eddy Cue says to cloud service employees: “Sorry guys we aren’t going to the brand new shiny spaceship campus”. https://t.co/sDbnV3eDoW

— Benjamin Mayo (@bzamayo) October 6, 2016

Apple is also continuing efforts to unify cloud resources that back its services like Apple Music, Siri and News with a new backend system codenamed ‘Pie’. Pie moves all the cloud infrastructure onto a single, Apple created platform. The report says parts of Siri, iTunes Store and Apple News already run on the new system.

An internal initiative will move more and more Apple services onto Pie over time. We have heard about some of these efforts before, with a McQueen codename. Bloomberg describes the ‘McQueen’ project as a storage service for things like user photos and videos and will allow Apple to drop its partnerships with Google and Amazon for cloud storage.

Employees will move into Apple Campus 2 early next year, Tim Cook has said. The latest drone footage of the building showed progress, including some exterior lighting.