Many of the people that read my articles undoubtedly arleady know this, but Apple has announced a sharp reduction in the number of services provided. Per this article, the Calendar, Contacts, DHCP, DNS, Mail, Messages, NetInstall, VPN, Websites, and Wiki services are being deprecated and Apple has provided a few services, per service, that they recommend moving to. Those services, per the above article, include the following:

Calendar

• Calendar and Contacts Server
• DavMail
• Radicale

Contacts

• Calendar and Contacts Server
• DavMail
• Citadel

DHCP

• Kea
• Dnsmasq
• FreeRADIUS

DNS

• BIND
• Unbound
• KnotDNS

Mail

• KerioConnect
• dovecot/Postfix
• Courier

Messages

• ejabberd
• Openfire
• Prosody

NetInstall

• NetSUS
• BSDPy

VPN

• OpenVPN
• SoftEther VPN
• Tcpcrypt

Websites

• Apache HTTP Server
• Nginx
• Lighttpd

Wiki

• MediaWiki
• PmWiki
• XWiki

I’ve been saying many of these services/features should go away in macOS Server so the developers could focus on providing an excellent experience and solid QA/unit testing for the services/features that remain. The fact that apps are being swiftified is great, as it speaks volumes to the future of the services themselves. The fact that Apple is reducing the number of licenses they’re tracking and the mistake they’re allowing customers to make is also great.

Having said that, every time I think that a service should go away, I hear from someone that they rely on that service. Most of this feedback comes from consultants who have made the server a central part of their consultancy. As someone who used to plan services as products for customers in consultancies, if you find yourself in similar situations when planning where services go when Apple retires them, I would strongly recommend looking at SaaS solutions where customers can give you a login and you can help guide them into a new and better solution. At least, that’s the way I positioned most of these services in the last version of the macOS Server book…

Yes, it was great having Apple handle all of the patching and customers were able to take advantage of a lot of technology with very few resources. However, that’s just not where we are any more. And rather than argue about it or try emailing Tim Cook or make petitions or even complain, save your cycles and look for new and better replacements for each service (preferably not ones that require physical servers, provided that customers are okay with that)! 

And stay tuned. I suspect we’ll cover this on an upcoming episode of the Mac Admins Podcast!

What are your thoughts? Remorse? Applause?

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