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Swift at Apple: Migrating the Password Monitoring Service from Java

Swift is heavily used in production for building cloud services at Apple, with incredible results. Last year, the Password Monitoring service was rewritten in Swift, handling multiple billions of requests per day from devices all over the world. In comparison with the previous Java service, the updated backend delivers a 40% increase in performance, along with improved scalability, security, and availability.

However, even with these advancements, managing garbage collection at scale remains a challenge due to issues like prolonged GC pauses under high loads, increased performance overhead, and the complexity of fine-tuning for diverse workloads. In addition to an excellent support system and tooling, Swift’s inherent emphasis on modularity and extensibility helped future-proof and simplify the integration and customizations needed for our service-specific functions. In addition to outperforming our previous Java-based application, Swift delivered better performance consistency, enhanced safety features, and robust reliability — all while requiring fewer resources by utilizing memory and CPU efficiently.

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