[HN Gopher] Apple silicon M1 as-a-Service
___________________________________________________________________
Apple silicon M1 as-a-Service
Author : edouardb
Score : 342 points
Date : 2021-02-02 08:48 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.scaleway.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.scaleway.com)
| maga wrote:
| I'm curious about how the hardware side of it all looks. Does
| Apple sell chips to these cloud providers or they are indeed
| using real/modified Mac Minis?
| teruakohatu wrote:
| I believe it is Mac Minis but I would think they strip them of
| the case.
| jiofih wrote:
| The aluminum case is a massive heat sink, no reason to remove
| it.
| JCBird1012 wrote:
| If it's already in a cooled data center, removing it could
| mean being able to fit more Minis in a rack with little
| downside to thermals. The aluminum case makes sense when
| you're not in a climate-controlled environment.
| IceWreck wrote:
| I saw a video of a mac only data center and they made
| customized racks to optimally fit real consumer Macs into those
| racks.
|
| They had those for the trashcan/cheese-grator macs, mac minis
| and well as the all-in-one macs for special use cases (yes they
| put those all in ones in a rack)
| skw-hn wrote:
| They use real retail macs. As for the modifications i don't
| know.
| detaro wrote:
| Using actual Macs is the only way. Apple does not care about
| helping cloud providers in any way (e.g. even just an exception
| to the 24h rental requirement would be huge for them, but not
| even AWS got that).
| reconquestio wrote:
| Sounds great, but I will not go for this the second time,
| Scaleway.
|
| Two years ago I purchased a server there, configured everything
| and started handling workload. Then I received the following
| email:
|
| Our support team created a new ticket associated to your account.
| Hello, Your instance 'REDACTED' is running on a hypervisor that
| encountered a critical failure. We are not able to power on the
| hypervisor again. We were not able to recover your local files
| located on your LSSD. Your node has been stopped. If you created
| snapshots of the server's volumes or if you halted your node
| recently, you will recover your volumes at their latest good
| state. We are sorry for the inconvenience. Scaleway Team
|
| -\\_(tsu)_/-
| londons_explore wrote:
| In cases like this, I would like them to offer a paid option to
| take the hardware to a data recovery specialist.
|
| For example, the email could say:
|
| "As the plan your instance was on did not include redundant
| storage, we regret to inform you we have no plans to recover
| the data on it. We will hold the server hardware for 7 days,
| and forward it to one of our approved data recovery experts on
| request. We can also send the data recovery expert encryption
| keys used for your account that they will need to recover data.
| There is a charge of $X for this service".
| ballenf wrote:
| I really liked this idea, until I realized that the net
| effect would be a post here: "their inferior hardware lost my
| data and then they tried to extort 5000EUR to get it back."
|
| While on paper it seems crazy that offering a customer an
| extra option could never be a negative, in practice it can.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Problems happen. Did you contact support and ask for a refund?
| How did they respond?
|
| If the PSU failed, there's not a lot they can do to prevent a
| critical failure. (Sounds like the drive failed in this case.)
| batterylow wrote:
| > Did you contact support and ask for a refund? How did they
| respond?
|
| How this was resolved is the most important part in my
| opinion
| Daho0n wrote:
| >If the PSU failed
|
| The PSU? As in one (1)? Because then, to quote Adam Savage,
| Well there's your problem!
| morganvachon wrote:
| Yeah that caught my eye as well. My home media server is a
| repurposed Dell tower server with redundant PSUs, if I can
| swing that for non-critical movies and TV shows, surely a
| large scale cloud provider will have not only redundant
| PSUs on each node, but their storage will be redundant and
| rebuildable as well? Else what are their customers actually
| paying for?
| wut42 wrote:
| Seriously problems happens, and you should not held Scaleway
| responsible for THIS.
|
| However-- you can definitely hold Scaleway responsible for the
| crazy price hike (that happened two or three times), very bad
| support (it improved a bit lately).
| wut42 wrote:
| For the ones downvoting me, please say why?
| Daho0n wrote:
| I didn't downvote but IMO it is because disagreement is
| often shown with votes instead of comments. Ability to
| downvote is a broken system, but saying that will also give
| downvotes, especially if you also point out a big site that
| have tried the up/downvote system already and shown have
| broken it really is.
| wut42 wrote:
| I just stated facts tho. They did have raised their
| pricing multiple times. It could be argued on the support
| quality, ok, but a comment with details is always better
| for this...
|
| What's also intringuing me is that my comment was at 5 or
| 6 points. And then in a couple of minutes went directly
| to -1.
| dest wrote:
| I had a similar issue (two years ago as well!) and support was
| pretty disappointing. It was a self hosted email server, all
| content just vanished.
|
| The only alternative they gave to me was to upgrade to another
| type of machine, as the previous one was not available anymore.
| It was noticeably more expensive of course.
|
| So in the end they had a failure and I ended up having to pay
| more (I found another solution at another provider)
| remram wrote:
| I left in 2018 when they increased all their prices 60%
| (EUR16/mo boxes turning EUR24/mo). I wouldn't rely on them for
| anything critical, but EUR2.40 for 24h is unbeaten right now. I
| have some software I need to build for Apple M1s and as far as
| I can see it's this or MacStadium (or buying a device).
| outime wrote:
| You may want to know that this also happens in more expensive
| providers like AWS.
|
| As a counterpoint, in my experience of a bunch of years with
| Scaleway they have always worked quite well. I left them due to
| the price getting out of hand.
| asaddhamani wrote:
| What did you move to?
| outime wrote:
| I can recommend Hetzner. For non-production stuff I highly
| recommend checking lowendtalk.com / lowendbox.com to see
| offers from different providers.
| espadrine wrote:
| The way I see it, Scaleway vs. AWS is the old tradeoff:
| enterprise-grade hardware vs. commodity hardware with resilient
| software.
|
| You can set up one AWS EC2 backed by an RDS.
|
| Or you can set up two Scaleway servers in failover, backed by
| three CockroachDB Scaleway nodes.
|
| In the second approach, you need more cheap things, but the
| total price can still be lower. On the other hand, you should
| not expect the same reliability from a single Scaleway node,
| compared to a single EC2.
| luhn wrote:
| EC2 isn't enterprise hardware, it's all commodity and, more
| lately, custom-designed silicon. It certainly fails, and
| Amazon's own recommendations call for redundancy using things
| like EC2 auto-scaling groups and RDS multi-AZ.
|
| EC2 has a slight leg up because EBS stores data redundantly,
| so a single disk failure won't knock out your data. But
| failure is still possible, and a durable storage strategy
| should involve backups.
| asah wrote:
| What's the problem exactly? hardware dies.
| mike_d wrote:
| SSD $/GB/mo was almost half what it is on AWS last time I
| checked. Run a clustered replicated storage system or ephemeral
| workload and you are fine.
| xchaotic wrote:
| I signed up to test this and they are already out of capacity. I
| hope they can keep ordering more quickly...
| jimmcslim wrote:
| For Scaleway and Amazon, does Apple ship these Mac Minis in the
| same packaging as retail, or do they strip it down to something
| less wasteful at that scale?
| tuananh wrote:
| from the images that i saw on the news, aws just shove those M1
| mini into the rack.
| sumanthvepa wrote:
| So what sort of virtualisation do they run on M1 macs? QEMU?
| mikmak wrote:
| none, it's baremetal servers
| xchaotic wrote:
| Can anyone recommend a database that already works on the M1
| chips?
| jarym wrote:
| Not used it on M1 yet but Postgres seems to:
| https://info.crunchydata.com/blog/postgresql-benchmarks-appl...
| ing33k wrote:
| No Nitro... Just a Mac mini
|
| this nitro https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/nitro/
|
| ( deg [?]? deg)
| dx034 wrote:
| Isn't nitro mostly AWS marketing? They profit from it as they
| burn fewer CPU cycles on virtualization for shared hardware.
| But on dedicated hardware you own everything anyway, so why
| bother if AWS virtualization runs there?
|
| The big difference is support for AWS ecosystem (also partly
| realized via nitro). You won't get that but for that price
| difference it's probably still ok.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| Is Nitro a problem? It's there to stop users destroying the
| hardware, and has minimal performance impact.
| javchz wrote:
| Anybody knows if Scaleway it's better than the parent company?
|
| I was an online.net costumer for a lot of years for a personal
| project, and a happy one, but then they changed the contract
| unilaterally, which included the billing going up almost 75% with
| another changes in the ToS. And look I get it, sometimes prices
| rises, and you can always change providers, so the problem was
| not that... but the customer service and poor communication.
|
| I only notice the change, after my credit card notified my of a
| higher charge than the ones I'm used to. There was not
| notification about it in the dashboard. And after a lot of
| tickets with representatives, they told me under the excuse of
| "ram / hdd prices are going up" the notice was send through
| email, and probably gmail mark it as spam... and then the
| nightmare to cancel begin.
|
| After telling them to cancel the account, they told that under
| the new contract (that I didn't accept) they could only do it if
| I got charged another extra month, even if from the start you
| always payed one month in advance, plus paying the setup fee at
| the beginning.
|
| Look I get it, hardware it's messy and prices can go up to stay
| in business, but this attitude of "I am altering the deal, pray I
| don't alter it any further" was the one that made me look for
| another solutions, and be skeptical about Scaleway despite in
| paper being a good alternative to Digital Ocean (that let me tell
| you, DO customer service it's gold in comparison to what I got
| from online).
| Hamuko wrote:
| I've had pretty terrible experiences with Online/Scaleway
| customer support and them just pulling the plug on services
| with no transition path (like C14). I've decided that I'd
| rather just pay Amazon or DigitalOcean more and not have to
| deal with Scaleway.
| jinzo wrote:
| Yeah, something similar happened to me @ Scaleway (so, the part
| before the rebrand/merger/whatever they did). Incredible price
| increase for my usecase. Even with the limited 25% discount, it
| grew out of hand. I'm in the process of migrating to Hetzner,
| but unfortunately some stuff is IP tied and it takes some time
| to fix everything.
|
| Even before that, the constant changing of plans for Cloud was
| anoying. One of the reasons I chose Scaleway was because they
| promised easy upgrade/increase of resources as I needed it on
| the VPS. But then they discontinued the line I was using and I
| had to create a completely new one anyway. Then I had to move
| that one to the higher priced models again. A lot of fuss for
| something I would just like to keep running as long as possible
| with as little involvment.
| miyuru wrote:
| I am in the same boat. they increases the price out of the
| blue and their instance availability for scaling up or down
| is not great.(M1 is out of stock now)
| karambahh wrote:
| I'm a former Scaleway employee so take this as a informed
| guess: DC4 space is divided in very small, secure rooms
| (which you can see in the promotional video) with space for
| like less than a dozen racks at a time.
|
| They probably filled a room with mac minis and will need to
| fill another room/racks to provide more hw to customers.
| wut42 wrote:
| It's the same, there's no "parent company", Online rebranded as
| Scaleway. Just a 75% increase ? You've been lucky. They also
| raised the prices two times since then on the Scaleway IaaS
| VMs.
|
| Stay away from them, I don't see how they could be trusted with
| pricing again
| javchz wrote:
| Oh, I use to think Online.net was the parent brand. Thanks
| for clarify. Didn't knew was a full rebranding. My impression
| was that was sub-brand something like soyoustart to OVH, in
| that case, I will keep away from scaleway too.
| wut42 wrote:
| It used to be the case. Online was doing dedicated
| servers/housing, Scaleway was IaaS. Now they went full
| "Scaleway", with Scaleway Dedibox being the dedicated part,
| and Scaleway Elements being IaaS!
| speedgoose wrote:
| Online rebranded as Scaleway, but there is a parent company
| called Iliad which is also the parent company of Free.
| wut42 wrote:
| Yes, but the parent was talking about Online ("I was an
| online.net customer")
| bleuarff wrote:
| I recently set up one of their "stardust" instance, which is
| the absolute cheapest one I found at ~2EUR/mo. Works as
| intended , not much more to say about it.
| Draken93 wrote:
| If you are looking for low-priced servers I can highly
| reccomend HETZNER[0].
|
| They are even cheaper then scaleway and I had no problems so
| far.
|
| [0]https://www.hetzner.com/cloud
| drcongo wrote:
| I second this. We use Hetzner Cloud for all our staging
| servers and have never had an outage, and I had a client on a
| bare metal Hetzner server for about 12 years before the hard
| drive eventually gave up.
| tealpod wrote:
| I have been using Hetzner and they are good and cheaper than
| AWS.
| KronisLV wrote:
| Would have loved to use Hetzner, sadly they rejected a
| picture of my ID card/passport (with some details blacked
| out) a few years ago when i tried registering and verifying
| my identity, i don't think there was any process for
| appealing to have someone else look at it again, thus my
| account ended up being blocked. Of course, this is just 1
| data point and i'm sure that the experience of other people
| is more positive in general!
|
| That said, the prices actually look pretty competetive and
| are indeed cheaper than Scaleway's offerings. However,
| Scaleway also recently came out with more cost effective
| instances, called Stardust (though the specifications are
| somewhat limited): https://blog.scaleway.com/a-star-is-born-
| as-scaleway-launche...
|
| Personally, i use Time4VPS for my VPSes, which is a somewhat
| small daughter company of a larger Lithuanian telecom
| (Interneto vizija). Affiliate link, if anyone is interested
| in having a look: https://www.time4vps.com/?affid=5294
|
| I've been using them for a few years, the uptimes and the
| performance both are generally pretty good, can even self-
| host an e-mail server and the few IPv4 addresses i've had
| from them haven't been blacklisted anywhere. However, they
| don't directly compete with SaaS or PaaS like AWS's or
| Scaleway's managed offerings.
| chappi42 wrote:
| Why wouldn't they reject a ID/passport with some details
| blacked out?
|
| They have proper support lines where one can call and ask.
| (At least this was so a couple of years ago, no need to
| call support since then..).
| oefrha wrote:
| > Why wouldn't they reject a ID/passport with some
| details blacked out?
|
| A better question is why would they? Sending an
| unredacted copy of my ID to some foreign company just to
| buy some hosting would seem crazy to me.
|
| Here's a quote from their authentication email when I
| signed up a few years ago:
|
| > As a new customer, we kindly request that you provide
| us with a copy (scan/photo) of your passport or ID card
| for authentication purposes. You can blur or block out
| information that is not necessary for authentication.
|
| I sent in a picture of my driver's license with
| everything except my photo, name, and address blacked
| out, and they approved it. (In hindsight I'm not even
| sure why I didn't black out the photo part.)
| chappi42 wrote:
| I stand corrected with them mentioning blur/block in the
| authentication email (this was not the case earlier). But
| anyhow, what is for you "some foreign company" and "some
| hosting" is for them "some customer" which most likely is
| nice/friendly but there are exceptions.
| KronisLV wrote:
| > Why wouldn't they reject a ID/passport with some
| details blacked out?
|
| In my subjective opinion, a better question would be: Why
| would they reject an ID/passport with some details
| blacked out?
|
| The ID card and the passport both have serial numbers on
| them, as well as sufficient information (issuer country
| and the institution within the country), that any decent
| implementation of validating such data should be able to
| look it up.
|
| As for the blacked out fields - they contain information
| pertaining to my social identification code, one that
| should be kept private under most circumstances
| (analogous to social security number in the US). It feels
| like that information could:
|
| - provide absolutely no benefit to them
|
| - compromise my privacy, should it be leaked due to
| improper handling of that data on their end
|
| If not providing such sensitive information is grounds
| for denying account verification and termination of an
| account, then i'm perfectly fine with that and will
| simply look elsewhere, for other services. Other people
| may disagree with that and provide any and all
| information, the handling of which they deem acceptable,
| which is okay (hence, i mentioned that others' experience
| might be more positive/successful in that regard).
|
| Maybe someone who works in the industry (not Hetzner in
| particular) and has worked with similar systems in the
| past may comment on what the mechanisms for validating ID
| cards and such are, and which bits of data are necessary
| and which aren't?
| JohnHaugeland wrote:
| I might go a further step, to:
|
| 1. Why does some webhost think it gets to ask for your
| passport?
|
| Lol the second they get hacked you have a world class
| identity theft nightmare
|
| Go to a host where asking for your most protected
| personal information isn't part of doing business. This
| is absolutely ridiculous
| da_big_ghey wrote:
| No kidding. Linode does a good job for cheap VPS
| machines, as do DigitalOcean and Vultr, and they don't
| feel the need to ask for identity documents. I haven't
| heard of big cloud providers (AWS, Azure, etc.) doing
| that either. Perhaps this is some quirk of German law? In
| any case, that would be an immediate reason not to do
| business with them.
| chappi42 wrote:
| There are bad actors. I don't know details but suspect
| that passport requirements help with deterring them. If
| Hetzner gets a bad reputation it affects all their
| customers.
|
| Nice that you have options which meet your wishes. But I
| like the way Hetzner is doing business (not to mention
| the great quality-price ratio which is hard to find
| elsewhere).
| icedchai wrote:
| When I ran a hosting provider, a small US-based one, we
| had to block most international signups simply because
| every one of them turned into a spammer. Abuse is a very,
| very big problem. They may have discovered that
| individuals from specific locations are generally
| troublesome and require stricter verification.
| wut42 wrote:
| Hetzner Cloud is nice! When I benchmarked SCW cloud and HZN
| cloud, Hetzner was the clear winner. SCW was a bit cheaper at
| the time. Now Hetzner is cheaper and faster! You just don't
| get as much bandwith.
| dx034 wrote:
| Hetzner is great for cloud but especially for dedicated
| instances. If you have your infrastructure as code, buying
| dedicated servers there is likely much cheaper and easier
| than using a large cloud provider and trying to scale.
|
| Only issue I have with them is that there's no way to get
| 10gbit/s (not even burstable) and that you don't get
| datacenters outside of Europe.
|
| Not affiliated with them, just a very happy customer.
| xearl wrote:
| you can order 10g uplinks for most of hetzner's dedicated
| servers (for ~EUR45/m).
| infofarmer wrote:
| I haven't used their 10G uplinks in years, but it seems
| they're still easily available at EUR1/TB over 20TB:
|
| https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/dedicated-server/general-
| info...
| dspillett wrote:
| I've got one of Hetzner's machine from the "auction" side
| (https://www.hetzner.com/sb) for various things that has been
| running along nicely for a while. Paying a pretty keen price
| for 3x3T drives (unless the storage is on a RAID backed SAN I
| never get a single drive remote machine), 32G RAM and a
| fairly decent (though far from leading edge) CPU.
|
| For cheaper (and other options in the same range or more
| expensive too) in a large array of configurations
| https://www.serverhunter.com/ and https://en.metadedi.net/
| are useful resources, though obviously do a little research
| before signing up for a host based on it being cheap.
| javchz wrote:
| I will check them out, the prices doesn't seem bad at all.
| Will try for a small projects, and if everything goes well
| maybe migrate bigger ones.
| Damogran6 wrote:
| Hetzner was one of the major sources of attack I experienced
| at my last job. Hackers thought they were a good value, too.
| (Was 5-ish years ago, not sure if that's the same case now.)
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| I mean... yes? Cheap servers are cheap servers no matter
| who's buying them or why
| [deleted]
| jedisct1 wrote:
| This is amazing!
| whalesalad wrote:
| Interesting to see a Flash-style loading bar make a return for
| these sorts of animated UI experiences.
| [deleted]
| throw14082020 wrote:
| Here are some marketing videos: Scaleway:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZJnrKjfA3s&feature=emb_titl...
| Amazon's Mac Mini:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pn3miC_tTH0&feature=emb_titl...
|
| Pricing:
|
| Scaleway Mac Mini M1: ~$85/month (converted from 70Euro's)
|
| MacStadium Mac Mini M1: $109/month
|
| Amazon Intel Mac Mini (they don't have m1): ~$26 per day,
| ~$780/month. Therefore, at NO scale, does Amazon mac mini sense.
| Amazon's pitch is to help companies reduce their infrastructure
| problem. Except for every machine you use on Amazon for a month,
| you could buy a brand new M1 mac mini
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| If you have a giant pile of data already in AWS, that you need
| to use _on_ a Mac for a short time, it may make more sense to
| rent a Mac next to all your existing data, rather than paying
| exorbitant transfer fees to get the data to a Mac elsewhere.
|
| AWS's transfer fees are a massive lock-in.
| tuananh wrote:
| except this would not be the case. we just need M1 instance
| from Scaleway or whoever provide it as runner / job executor.
| not much data egress for those traffic.
| rovr138 wrote:
| That's a big assumption on how EVERY company that needs an
| M1 and uses AWS uses it for
| WrtCdEvrydy wrote:
| The most common use case for a Mac in a business setting
| is for building iOS applications.
| rovr138 wrote:
| You may have to define business.
|
| Account managers, web developers, python developers,
| Julia developers, sysadmin, netsec.
|
| All those areas are riddled with Mac.
| treis wrote:
| But none of that code runs on Mac alone. Even if they're
| developing on a Max their python or Julia or whatever
| code that they want to run on the cloud will run on
| Linux. The only real use case out there is
| building/testing iOS/Mac applications. The only other one
| I can think of is a Mac only video editing or animation
| software that you'd prefer to render somewhere besides
| your laptop.
| random5634 wrote:
| This comment is on most AWS stories. Bandwidth charges alone
| are usually significantly higher than you can get elsewhere.
|
| My own guess - a bit of a niche product not super easy to scale
| do they set a rediculous price. If the governance wins are
| there - they may still sell some - they rarely do stuff w out
| customer demand. At least in govt contracting - if you are
| willing to jump through all the hoops, some insane markups
| exist.
| tgtweak wrote:
| Makes sense if you only need it for an hour every day to do a
| build and/or run a QA automation test. The billing on it is
| per-second.
|
| Worth noting that they require 1 day minimum to play ball, so
| kicking the tires is not a per-hour option. There is also no
| spot market for them, and no reserved instance pricing either.
|
| It seems like AWS has really replicated the Apple experience in
| more ways than hardware.
| [deleted]
| nathancahill wrote:
| I understand that the 1 day requirement is from Apple and
| thus AWS requires that minimum too.
| fuzzer37 wrote:
| Why did Apple require a 1 day minimum?
| nix23 wrote:
| >https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZJnrKjfA3s&feature=emb_titl..
| .
|
| Start watching the video, thinking no baguette?? 1:03 here it
| is!! Thanks France, love your sense of humor!!
| allyant wrote:
| Although to me-and-you and to an extent SME's it may seem crazy
| to buy one over running it on-prem or at other companies to
| large organisations it makes perfect sense and the cost is just
| a drop in the ocean compared to their normal AWS monthly bill.
| Lets not forget AWS will only invest time if there are
| customers who will actually use it.
|
| A few points from the top of my head:
|
| * Large enterprises won't pay the costs listed publicly, they
| will each have their own contract written up with AWS.
|
| * Contracts - it can take YEARS for new companies to be added
| to the approved vendors list.
|
| * Frameworks will already be in place for how resources are
| managed and accessed securely.
|
| * Enterprise support agreements will already be in place.
|
| * Physical security that is regularly audited
| bserge wrote:
| Few things on AWS make sense financially. They're just
| leveraging the power of lock-in(tm). Why save money on AWS when
| you can save money on employee salaries?
| rk06 wrote:
| Those are MRPs. Amazon will be giving heavy discount to large
| customers anyway
| christophilus wrote:
| AWS's margin is Scaleway's opportunity, you might say.
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| Normally yes, it should be, but I don't think it's going to
| happen. People have been (1) miscalculating the costs of AWS,
| (2) realizing they are relatively high but deciding to stick
| to them for various reasons for a long time now. And because
| Amazon managed to capture many companies with their
| marketing, in many cases it's practically impossible to get
| out.
| christophilus wrote:
| Yeah. It was just a snarky play on the famous Bezos quote,
| "Your margin is my opportunity."
| tumblewit wrote:
| Given the ridiculously low power requirement of m1 chips if
| anyone wants to use these probably in small scale capacities
| they should just buy it. The power and maintenance won't be
| that much if a hassle (10 of these would use less than 300w)
| and you would get warranty too. I think the mac mini m1 was
| designed (lack of) by apple to replace current mac mini racks
| but ideally this thing can be as tiny as a 3rd gen apple tv and
| a rack of 10-20 could be as small as a mac pro ...
| bogwog wrote:
| If you have, for example, a profitable cross-platform mobile
| app, but your developers primarily use windows/linux and test
| on Android, then it might make sense. If all you need is to
| spin up a mac for the occasional build/test/deploy, then
| paying $85 per month is easier than having to maintain an M1
| in the office that no one is going to regularly use,
| especially if your team is distributed and/or remote.
| phire wrote:
| In many large companies, operational costs are often
| budgeted differently from capital expenditures.
|
| The workflow from approving a $85/month cost can be
| significantly easier than approving a $1,099 purchase.
|
| Also, renting an machine from a 3rd party might allow you
| to avoid dealing with a dysfunctional IT department.
| throw14082020 wrote:
| Well thats what we need from Apple next. The Mac Rack of 10
| M1 chips (aka. Mack). Not sure how useful that would be for
| me personally though. My reasoning being, if 1 chip takes
| 30W, why not double the number of chips or do something to
| the chip to get more from it.
| moonbug wrote:
| don't hold your breath. There are good reasons the X-Serve
| line doesn't exist any more.
| _underfl0w_ wrote:
| Do those reasons still exist in 2021? What are/were some
| of them? (Genuinely curious, not playing devil's
| advocate)
| ogre_codes wrote:
| I have no idea why it was canned, but it was a very
| expensive server with a very expensive SAN solution. I
| think it just didn't compete well with other enterprise
| class machines on price.
|
| People are willing to pay more for a Mac Laptop/ desktop
| because the overall experience is nice. The screen, the
| construction, keyboard (save the shitty one), trackpad,
| Retina display, high speed SSD, etc all significantly
| affect user experience.
|
| When the primary use case is sitting in a closet and
| serving up bits quickly, it quickly boils down to bang
| for the buck where the Mac has always lagged. The M1
| could very well change this though. Particularly since
| power use is significantly better.
|
| Also, when the Xserve was around, there weren't nearly as
| many iPhone developers looking for CI solutions. Seems
| like now there would be a pretty healthy demand for that
| alone.
| dan1234 wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised if Mac Pro version of the M1 has
| everything turned up to 11.
| tumblewit wrote:
| it's going to be interesting with the 16 inch macbook pro
| the imac and mac pro. of course apple has the full
| licence with ARM to do almost anything they want but
| based on my understanding the X ARM cores the 7 series
| and 5 series can be clustered. My guess would be apple
| moves to a cluster based design eventually like in m1 but
| with more cores for higher end machines but right now i'd
| say just a chiplet version of current m1 chips would
| still be a great option with higher frequency. A 4 or 8
| chiplet design would still be only 150w or so with gpus
| disabled or somehow using all gpus as one. This is the
| strategy amd has gone with obviously with chiplet without
| gpus but I think this also makes sense for apple to reuse
| its designs.
| wooger wrote:
| Or maybe it's just a big I/O & power box, with a bunch of
| slots on top that accept a Mac mini. Like a more stylish
| SNES.
| petercooper wrote:
| I think the scale where it makes sense is at companies where
| paying $780/month to an existing provider is easier than all
| the paperwork and internal regulations around allowing people
| to provision on prem equipment or use an untrusted provider.
|
| Consider the item from yesterday about AWS Outposts:
| https://ahl.medium.com/aws-outposts-2021-stories-for-folks-w...
| .. the markup is absolutely mind boggling, but there are
| companies who pay it.
|
| AWS is the master of having a pricing model that feels nice to
| most indies and small/medium companies but that scales up
| extremely effectively to capture huge amounts of enterprise
| spend at the same time.
| ksec wrote:
| >AWS is the master of having a pricing model that feels nice
| to most indies and small/medium companies but that scales up
| extremely effectively to capture huge amounts of enterprise
| spend at the same time.
|
| I wonder if there are any other industry that does the same.
| Most ( if not all ) of the time pricing dont scale to both
| ends. But AWS pricing seems to be the outliner here.
| cryptoquick wrote:
| I mean, you're not wrong.
|
| For example, I know many furry artists who open their
| commissions and within an hour get 20 solid offers to pay
| them. They can't possibly do all the work, so they just lose
| business.
|
| That's, uh, not how capitalism works! Companies like Amazon
| know, all you have to do is charge 10x more to capture all of
| that value. Sure, it sucks for 18 other potential customers,
| but these furry artists have tens of thousands of fans who
| will enjoy the work regardless.
| michaelbuckbee wrote:
| Here's a really interesting pricing model your friend might
| be able to use to capture more value (and not make the
| community mad).
|
| https://kevinlynagh.com/notes/pricing-niche-products/
| pbronez wrote:
| Great example of the power of auctions! It's amazing to
| see the Vickrey Auction come off the blackboard and
| enable an indie creator to connect with their community
| sustainably. Markets really are all about moving
| information so we can coordinate activity.
|
| Wouldn't it be awesome for Kickstarter / Patreon to add
| this as a feature?
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Does such an auction hold under the modification made for
| multiple participant?
|
| Generally if you intentionally overbid you end up paying
| the otherwise highest amount discouraging that kind of
| action (ie you may as well put your max amount).
|
| But if the top 10 pay the price of the 11th bid there's a
| perverse incentive for me individually to just say I'm
| bidding $1 million because I know that most other players
| are likely to not be smart enough (at least in the short
| term) to bid strategically and thus I'm guaranteed to get
| the item at a steeper discount without having to reveal
| (or bother thinking about) my true max price for the
| item.
| cryptoquick wrote:
| Reading more of it, it looks an awful lot like the
| business model behind YCH auctions-- Your Character Here.
| That's a very successful model, and it often results in
| prices $400+, which is about 2-3x more than what artists
| often charge otherwise.
|
| That said, YCH is a more traditional auction over a
| single piece, not a Vickrey auction over a specific
| supply. According to this model, a Vickrey model would
| be:
|
| - Scope the work to a specific standard that the artist
| specifies, in terms of colors, quality, characters,
| background, etc. That way, the bid is on a roughly
| equivalent amount of labor per piece.
|
| - People put in (blind) what they're willing to pay
|
| - When demand is exceeded, the nth+1 highest is what
| everyone pays.
|
| Very fair!
|
| I'd be curious if there'd be a way to price something
| more custom; for example, putting a price on the number
| of hours required for each feature (more color or
| shading, more characters, etc.), how would that affect
| such a pricing dynamic?
| cryptoquick wrote:
| That's a really good idea! I'm going to send this to the
| people who make https://commiss.io, thanks!
| treeman79 wrote:
| That's first step of capitalism.
|
| When someone makes crazy profit, you'll have fast
| followers.
|
| More artist will switch. Prices will drop. At some point
| some artist will drop out and a rough equilibrium will
| occur.
|
| Then one of the artist will lobby a law that limits the
| number of furry artist.
|
| Prices go back up due to restriction.
|
| People complain at high cost of furry art. Licensed artist
| will lobby a new tax on all artist to subsidize the cost of
| furry art.
|
| Now non furry artist are paying the furry artist.
|
| Customers get confused on using tax vouchers on Furry
| artist.
|
| Non furry artist who complain are now regularly attacked
| for not supporting the Arts.
| afpx wrote:
| Ouch. That's cynical. But, sadly not too far from the
| truth.
|
| But, what's the alternative? Capitalism without human
| nature?
| treeman79 wrote:
| Everything in story was fine until government got
| involved.
|
| Capitalism increases efficiency by being ruthless.
| Better, cheaper, more or die.
|
| Government and regulatory capture screw it all up.
| dbtc wrote:
| But what about the trees, treeman79?
|
| The problem is capitalism optimizes for profit, not life.
| treeman79 wrote:
| Some regulation.
|
| Not allowing Dumping toxic Waste in river is one thing.
|
| Banning ride sharing In cities to protect taxi companies
| is another.
| dhosek wrote:
| You're assuming that 2 of those 20 potential customers
| would pay 10x, when it could be that 20 of the 20 would
| balk at 1.1x.
| dannyw wrote:
| Not a furry artist but similar vein. There are genuinely
| a surprising number of people who are willing to pay 5 to
| 10x the market rate for commissions.
| buran77 wrote:
| Of course that requires some market analysis not a
| straight up "let's charge 20x". But when talking about
| limited capacity in general it makes sense that you
| overcharge to capture as much value as possible. Some
| customers are always willing to pay more so if you
| somehow know or can guess the distribution of offers it
| makes sense to capture everything from the most valuable
| buyer group down to whatever your capacity can cover
| rather than a random collection in the middle.
|
| In the case of the M1 it might make sense to charge at
| these levels especially for customers that aren't
| interested in using anywhere near the full value of the
| product. So if a company or developer estimates it will
| only use the equivalent of 50% of the Mac's price it
| would be a better deal than purchasing the thing outright
| and also pay the associated operational costs. As always
| you have to know your market if you want to maximize the
| profit.
| EveYoung wrote:
| I would assume that Amazon's offering is targeted at customers
| who already using other AWS services. So even if a Mac Mini
| costs $500 per month more, it's really not that big of a deal
| considering how much the bureaucracy of signing up with a new
| hosting provider would cost in a big company (e.g., legal,
| infosec, ...).
| carstenhag wrote:
| Ohh yes. We had built a small tool that business people had
| to use, in form of a questionnaire, that went through about
| 20 topics. Depending on the question/answer it was an
| immediate "nope, must-have, don't sign a contract".
|
| Ironically this (nope-case) was always the case if the
| provider ran on AWS.
| Abishek_Muthian wrote:
| I was using Scalway's ARM (Cavium) 2core/2GB instance for a web
| application (HTML+Minimal Vanilla JS+Go+PSQL) until they suddenly
| pulled the plug on their ARM instances. I didn't like the way
| they did it and so I migrated to AWS x86 T2.micro 1core/1GB, but
| surprisingly the application seems faster here although I think
| Scaleway had greater network bandwidth.
|
| It may be that I didn't use ARM optimized version of PostgreSQL
| or some other variable I'm missing. But anyways Apple M1 could be
| more performant than any of the low-mid x86 offering considering
| the work is optimized for ARM.
| jtwigg wrote:
| I recieved plenty of emails in good notice and saw warnings
| throughout the console about the disconinuation of arm. moving
| away from arm was easy too.
| Abishek_Muthian wrote:
| Received the first email in April telling, technical support
| would end in July and servers pulled out by December. No
| detail or technical documentation on why they had to do it
| and just pointed their customers to the migration document.
|
| What about those customers who had spent extensive resources
| on optimising their work for ARM, when they forced a x86
| migration?
|
| A cloud provider can do better than just 3 months notice.
| Naturally it was not just me who was unhappy[1].
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22866216
| [deleted]
| JPKab wrote:
| Just bought a Macbook pro last week, and now I'm wondering if I
| was a giant moron for steering away from the M1. Just seemed like
| it was going to cause me a lot of headaches when my target
| instances are all on x86.
| Beefin wrote:
| Rosetta is pretty effective, I don't see any significant
| difference in performance.
| stefanjarina wrote:
| Interesting.
|
| However I would be way happier if they added openSUSE to their
| distro offer and present some plan what they are planning to do
| about centos situation.
|
| So far they only have Fedora and CentOS as RPM distros. I do not
| consider Fedora a server distro and CentOS 8 is finished. Their
| support is silent for now...
| mobilemidget wrote:
| I clicked this and same time, got an email notification from
| Scaleway about the exact same thing, what are the odds :)
| nly wrote:
| Hetzner have also just announced 5950X servers at EUR99/mo ($120
| USD/mo), bringing Zen 3 to the data center early.
|
| The raw power you can get these days for peanuts/mo if you go for
| bare metal is impressive.
| speedgoose wrote:
| On AWS for the same price you get nothing but crap.
| klohto wrote:
| You get what you pay for. Optimize your architecture and you
| can do r6gd.4xlarge at $0.3174/hour or ~189EUR/month.
|
| I don't understand comparing AWS to Hetzner. If you want just
| bare-metal there are much better clouds.
| speedgoose wrote:
| You can't really compare an ARM AWS vCPU to a bare-metal
| Ryzen 9 core though.
|
| And the AWS offer is missing storage and bandwidth, which
| are extremely expensive if you want something comparable.
| klohto wrote:
| That's why I choose the `d` EC2. They come with NVMe SSD
| ephemeral storage and in terms of bandwidth, AWS will
| beat it anyway. R6 is around 10Gbps if I remember
| correctly.
| e12e wrote:
| Hetzner gives you 20TB/month outgoing bw + 1euro/TB if
| you add 39 euro for 10gbps uplink - or un-metered 1gbps
| bw.
|
| Even if you have "up to 10 gbps" bw from aws - it's going
| to be much more expensive! And if you just need low
| latency (and "no" data), 1 gbps would probably serve you
| just as well?
|
| So at those prices (essentially no bandwidth) - you could
| get _two_ physical servers from hetzner...
|
| Fwiw i agree comparing aws to dedicated doesn't make much
| sense - but unless flexibility is important - I don't see
| aws comming out on top from such a simple comparison.
| speedgoose wrote:
| With 8TB of not throttled IO ?
| klohto wrote:
| How are you going to throttle local storage on bare-metal
| exactly? Ephemeral isn't over network, it's directly
| attached. So yes, even 8TB.
| speedgoose wrote:
| Yes the local storage is not throttled on bare-metal.
| Maybe these new AWS instance with ephemeral storage are
| not throttled as well, I can't find the information.
|
| Anyway, it's not 8TB but 1TB and on the AWS price
| calculator it costs 650EUR for this instance. You may
| have access to special prices.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > I don't understand comparing AWS to Hetzner. If you want
| just bare-metal there are much better clouds.
|
| Share, please? I'd love to get off of Hetzner, but their
| prices absolutely destroy everything else
| martinald wrote:
| The thing is though for many workloads (I'd even say most)
| applications get I/O constrained way quicker than CPU, so
| scaling CPU will not give you the boost that you expect on
| AWS and the other big cloud providers.
|
| Keep in mind that PCIe4 NVMes can do 5-7GB/sec (gigabytes -
| not gigabits) read and write, with up to 500K IOPS.
|
| Compare that to RDS on AWS which charges a comical $0.10
| per IOPS-month, so just for IO it would be $50k/month (and
| for many DBs IOPS are more important than CPU) to meet the
| performance of one NVMe SSD, which can be bought retail for
| probably $200.
|
| I don't think I've ever seen such ridiculous pricing. I do
| understand AWS can be more expensive, but it is just
| outrageous margin for IO performance (and external
| bandwidth, but that's a whole other story!).
| mhh__ wrote:
| The sheer amount of know-how required to not shoot yourself in
| the foot is intimidating to me at least - i.e. I am much more
| comfortable working on a compiler than setting up a server in a
| way that it doesn't get pwned
|
| I want to get some kind of CI going that can spot cache miss
| hotspots, and other things like that (ideally implementing
| Intel TMA) - the price is reasonable, the software is hard but
| solved, but I literally have no idea how to run (or better, how
| not to run) a bare metal server safely.
| SXX wrote:
| I'm in no way a person who run some cluster on bare metal
| servers, but managing them are not any different than cloud
| compute instance. Only extra thing you need is to have some
| monitoring for SMART status of your drive.
|
| > I am much more comfortable working on a compiler than
| setting up a server in a way that it doesn't get pwned
|
| 99% of the time all you need is to have firewall up, password
| login off and unattended upgrades enabled. It's will
| literally never get pwned then.
| rovr138 wrote:
| I add fail2ban as good measure too.
|
| I don't know about literally, but it helps.
| e12e wrote:
| If you only allow incomming traffic to sshd, and require
| ssh-key login (no password login), fail2ban will likely
| only add complexity, not security.
| SXX wrote:
| It's can certainly be useful if you use anything with
| password auth or just want to avoid logs full of bots,
| but otherwise just change default SSH port.
| bserge wrote:
| People 10-20 years ago could do it just fine, I'm sure you
| can, too :)
| nly wrote:
| Hosting for most companies should be a commodity.
|
| I've seen entire businesses supporting double digit employees
| run off single $20/mo DO droplets, with just the builtin
| backup/snapshot capability used for redundancy. One of these
| had 50,000 concurrent realtime API users on such a droplet.
|
| Ultimately what is most important is knowing your needs and
| how quickly you can recover from disaster, not how much you
| spend on infrastructure.
|
| Simulating the "Ok we came in to the office this morning and
| Digital Ocean no longer existed" scenario is more valuable to
| most small businesses than just throwing money at over-
| engineered AWS solutions.
| Jamieee wrote:
| For what it's worth, I've been using Scaleway for a few years and
| have had a really great experience.
|
| I would absolutely recommend them.
| mahgnous wrote:
| What is the practical purpose of this though? I can't think of a
| use case that I would need a mac specifically for. Everything's
| using containers, I don't know of anyone that is building out
| mach-o binaries for backend? I don't get it.
| amzans wrote:
| I am getting an " Oops, an error occurred!" message.
|
| Update: I opened it with Chrome and it works fine. It's not a
| "hug of death" as I initially thought.
|
| It's on Safari (iPhone 12 Pro iOS 14.4) that it's always leading
| to the error above. In case it's helpful for the website owners
| if they see this.
| pmontra wrote:
| Firefox Android: it works only if I request the desktop site.
| hans1729 wrote:
| Works flawless for me, both before and after you commented.
| IceWreck wrote:
| I don't see an error message and can view the page but if a
| hosting company's website can be "hugged to death" then that
| doesn't exactly inspire confidence in them.
| jiofih wrote:
| You're right, everything besides AWS and GCS sucks. Thanks
| for warning the rest of us /s
|
| If it's only failing in one browser it's obviously not a
| capacity issue. Works on my iPhone btw.
| hans1729 wrote:
| I wonder who precicely this is targeted for. The concept is
| interesting, but doesn't everyone who develops for macos already
| have a mac? Or is this actually an economic path with respect to
| cloud computing?
| [deleted]
| hmsimha wrote:
| > I wonder who precicely this is targeted for. The concept is
| interesting, but doesn't everyone who develops for macos
| already have a mac?
|
| Maybe, but is everyone who develops for OSX going to have an M1
| in 2021-2022? I just bought a refurbished Intel-based Macbook
| Air (for just $50 shy of what a new M1 Air would have cost) due
| to concerns about virtualization software compatibility. People
| developing software to run on OSX may not want to invest in M1
| machines this early, and small-to-midsized companies who rely
| on their Mac farms to run test suites etc. may not want to
| duplicate their infrastructure just to validate their software
| on M1, when they can perhaps meet their needs by using elastic
| M1 services.
| zingar wrote:
| One of the obstacles to docker coming to m1 was being able to
| set up their test pipeline with m1 instances.
|
| Beyond that sort of thing I am mystified
| pmontra wrote:
| A customer of mine runs a static and dynamic vulnerability
| analysis service for Android and iOS apps (their customers are
| the companies developing those apps.) They have Mac Minis to
| perform some processing that Apple wants to be done only on a
| Mac.
| trollski wrote:
| sheep who cannot do simple math and/or are embedded in a mba
| genertaed bureacracy. that means 99% of population out there.
| k_bx wrote:
| Our startup relies on server-side HTML rendering in Headless
| Chrome, and some ImageMagick image manipulation. Due to how
| optimised these machines are for this use-case, I do plan to
| evaluate them to replace the much pricier AWS instances.
| catmanjan wrote:
| Have you tried browserless.io?
| k_bx wrote:
| Thanks, might check it out
| bzb6 wrote:
| I don't see how those things need a Mac
| bartvk wrote:
| But they could have a preference for the platform, no?
| jiofih wrote:
| A dedicated x86 machine with equivalent performance for
| those two tasks is a lot more expensive.
| gallexme wrote:
| (if i get it correctly it's mostly cause it's a gpu bound
| task? (hardware acceleration of the browser engine?))
| Back in 2017 hetzner offered gtx1080s for around 70EUR a
| month with 64gb ram and and a 4+ghz quad Intel CPU, n 2x
| 512gb ssd
|
| Im sure these days it's not hard enough to find smth with
| equilavent processing power in that price range
|
| Maybe even direct contact with hetzner could help you out
| these days(they stopped offering them cause of abuse)
|
| And if it's not a gpu bound task but badly concurrently
| cpu tasks Then maybe a game server specific dedicated
| hosting (they use consumer CPUs with uo to 5+ghz single
| core performance) wouldn't also be a lot of money
|
| N if its a good concurrency task then the amd CPU
| offering of hetzner beats all(high memory, insanely fast
| iops, lots of core) , and has a offering for 5950x these
| days
| k_bx wrote:
| They don't and currently work on Linux. It just might turn
| out to be much cheaper to use this one
| Thorrez wrote:
| I would guess it's for people who need to run automated tests
| that their Mac M1 software works. Or maybe there's some program
| that only works on M1 and they need to run it in an automated
| manner (a compiler?).
| canofbars wrote:
| Its almost always cheaper to just buy a mac mini than to rent
| one out 24/7 though. I think Apple also made a tos change
| banning renting them by the hour as well.
| jiofih wrote:
| Will take a year for the rent to cover the price of a mini,
| and it includes bandwidth, IP assignment and power. Not a
| bad deal at all.
| oblio wrote:
| If you're a small operation, maybe. If you're a big company
| you probably want to have a service, not extra hardware you
| have to manage, and the rental cost is a rounding error for
| your software development costs.
| ponyous wrote:
| I was evaluating scaleway a couple of years ago. I had issues
| setting up firewall, some kernel errors were thrown when I tried
| to reconfigure iptables.
|
| It seemed like such a basic thing that I completely lost trust in
| them then.
| IceWreck wrote:
| 72 EUR/month. At that price, why not keep them in house ? It
| would be cheaper.
| dagw wrote:
| Getting in-house IT to host a machine in their(our?) on-site
| data center would cost my department a lot more than
| 72eur/month, and that is before I pay for the hardware.
| hkt wrote:
| Scaleway have an API that could realistically be driven through
| a CI process. Assuming the idea is to do automated testing, and
| to destroy instances when done, the cost is likely to be pretty
| low.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| Apple does not allow renting Macs less than 24 hours.
| hkt wrote:
| The page specifies the price is hourly and doesn't seem to
| list that restriction. Could you please link to where it is
| specified?
|
| Edit: I don't think you're right. I've checked the Scaleway
| console and it appears the minimum unit of billing for this
| is one hour. I'd check, but they're out of stock.
|
| Second edit: I missed the part where it says 24 hour
| minimum period on the instance setup page:
|
| "As required by Apple License, you must keep this instance
| at least 24 hours. You will be able to delete it only after
| 24 hours."
| dmlittle wrote:
| Here[1] is the license for BigSur. The relevant section
| is 3.A.(ii). This clause was added for BigSur so I
| _think_ that if you're leasing a VPS with macOS Catalina
| or older you can legally rent it for less than 24 hours.
|
| [1] https://www.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/macOSBigSur.pdf
|
| Edit: It seems that before BigSur the legallity of
| subleasing macOS was a "gray area". I guess as long as it
| doesn't hurt Apple they didn't come after you.
| cromka wrote:
| Catalina is not available for M1, though.
| usrusr wrote:
| Makes me wonder how they draw the line between renting a
| Mac and providing a service which happens to run on a Mac.
| I guess I know the answer (arbitrarily).
| vbezhenar wrote:
| AWS charges $26 per day. Someone buys those.
| beagle3 wrote:
| What you pay for in AWS is access to the entire ecosystem,
| and cheap internal bandwidth to the rest of the AWS
| customers.
|
| Scaleway offers neither. Their competition is Linode and
| Digital Ocean.
|
| But at 72eur/month for M1, you could buy it in a year so it's
| actually a reasonable price. Unlike AWS if all you need is
| compute.
| ddorian43 wrote:
| > cheap internal bandwidth
|
| This is vendor lockin that AWS put you in and now you
| mention like it's a pro.
| beagle3 wrote:
| It's network effect, not vendor lock-in. If you are doing
| B2B, chances are good your peers are also in AWS,
| regardless of the lock-in effects of other Amazon
| services (which are real, and like any lock-in are always
| negative).
|
| I am old enough to have collocates at Exodus in 2000 for
| the exact same reason: everyone I needed to work with
| collocates with them. (The later went bankrupt and became
| Savvis, no idea what they are called today or if they
| still exist)
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Even if 90% of your peers are in Amazon, the egress fees
| on the other 10% cost more than sending _all_ of your
| data over a competitively priced network connection.
|
| And that's the best case, where all your connections to
| them start and end in the same availability zone. Just
| inter-AZ fees cost more than you'd normally pay for
| transit.
|
| It's almost entirely lock-in.
| amq wrote:
| GitHub Actions charge $0.08 per minute ($115 per day).
| jsnk wrote:
| I am interested in hosting my own server, but I am not sure how
| to go about setting one up. Does anyone know a guide on this
| topic?
| tempay wrote:
| At that price it takes about a year to pay for the hardware.
| Factoring in the cost of hosting the hardware it seems
| reasonable (macstadium charges 30-70 EUR a month for colocation
| alone).
|
| It's still not cheap if you can ignore the hosting cost and
| need it for several years but it's way cheaper than using AWS
| for intel mac minis.
| imtringued wrote:
| You can probably stop renting on the weekend and if you have
| an app with infrequent updates you don't need to pay every
| day. With the right workflow it is definitively cheaper than
| buying.
| bartvk wrote:
| I'm working for a customer whose IT only really deals with
| Microsoft. We as iOS developers had an internally set up build
| server but it's unused right now, because everybody works
| remote and it's behind the corporate mote. This Scaleway
| offering would work much better.
| tyingq wrote:
| You could get a rackmount kit and then ship it to a hosting
| company: https://www.sonnettech.com/product/mac-mini-mounting-
| solutio...
| lmilcin wrote:
| You want dusty Mac Mini laying under desk somewhere which if
| fails will put your entire operation on pause for couple of
| days?
|
| There might be valid business uses for that, but for a company
| that invested a huge amount of money in a team of developers
| and then pays them through the nose for every hour whether they
| work or not and maybe have clients that count on updates, that
| is simply not acceptable.
|
| Also many companies choose to have their entire infra in the
| cloud and then it doesn't make sense to spend effort to
| integrate one physical machine.
| cbKSF wrote:
| The failure rate of single machine setups is way overrated
| (also, you could have several machines of course).
|
| We need decentralization, smaller providers like Hetzner and
| also in-house IT.
| lmilcin wrote:
| It is not failure rate, it is the cost if it happens.
|
| I work for large corporations and the calculations are
| entirely different from what a small, cash strapped startup
| would be doing.
|
| For example, if you work on a new product and it would take
| 1 day to get Mac Mini for free vs you would be paying for
| cloud solution 1000 dollars daily but get it one day
| sooner, it might still be well worthwhile to get cloud
| version.
|
| Because if you think about it, it is possible that Mac Mini
| would be holding up your product development for one day,
| then you calculate how much you hope to earn from that
| product daily and how much you are loosing while you
| haven't launched and then it is no brainer.
|
| As I said, it depends on business case. For some, the cost
| of this M1 VM is not going to be any factor in the
| decision.
|
| Have you seen how expensive GPUs are in the cloud? Have you
| seen how many clients are that pay for huge farms of these?
| tomschwiha wrote:
| A product landingpage without any price information is imo a No-
| Go.
| epaga wrote:
| That's exactly how I feel, which is why I was pleasantly
| surprised to see "0.10EUR/hour M1 Mac Mini" right there on the
| front page.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| What's the minimum period?
| angristan wrote:
| It's 24h, as requested by Apple's EULA
| doingitwell wrote:
| That isn't shown on mobile. Seems like poor design.
| orangepanda wrote:
| It's also part of an svg. Is it accessible to screen
| readers?
| oblio wrote:
| Aren't SVG text? I imagine they can be made accessible.
| wut42 wrote:
| Don't plan on this price for too long tho. They are notorious
| for raising prices and then raising them again and again.
| skw-hn wrote:
| The price is in the bubble near the macbook image. 0.10EUR/h
| [deleted]
| dmitriid wrote:
| A _static_ product landing page that shows a _progress bar_ as
| it 's loading is a No-Go as well
| jafingi wrote:
| Funny, because the price is in the top most hero section on my
| computer. EUR0.10/hour
| mrtksn wrote:
| So what's the main value of this? How people are using it? Is it
| used like a remote DEV machine that you use through remote
| desktop/SSH? Is it used to host software developed for Mac? Some
| use case where you need very high bandwidth for your app?
|
| It looks cool but I'm having hard time to justify the reason for
| the existence of the service probably because I never used "Mac
| on the cloud" and I don't know what I am mission out. Can anyone
| enlighten me here?
| FrojoS wrote:
| I assume for development and testing of your Mac app. E.g. if
| you are not primarily a Mac user and just want to port your
| Windows app.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| The price feels high for that, yes? Hardward is relatively
| inexpensive and falling.
|
| Put another way, with this "lease" after a year you could
| have bought and owned the vehicle. Instead, you're committed
| to another year.
|
| That said, I assume there are security advantages to this
| model. Better control of access, etc.
| purplecats wrote:
| this got me thinking. instead of buying a new mac every 2 years
| (about 600$+ a year + transition labor I guess), I would rather
| just use my current mac, and stream into a VM with the latest
| mac running on really good hardware and use that as a saas. is
| this a thing?
| martinald wrote:
| Not possible really. MacOS has terrible remote desktop
| software which is really laggy and generally crap even on
| gigabit FTTH.
|
| They all seem to be based off VNC, instead of something
| closer to Windows RDP which seems to be a lot smarter in how
| it sends it over (I cannot notice I'm on RDP most of the
| time). It also has loads more features (for example, it can
| change resolution dynamically as you go into full screen
| instead of being static), handles audio well, etc.
|
| I could be wrong on this - would be interested to hear if
| anyone has had a better experience.
| mrtksn wrote:
| I wouldn't agree. I often connect to my GF's Macbook to
| help her out with a code or something like that. You can't
| watch a video but it is phenomenal to work together on the
| same thing because it's very easy to connect and has a
| phenomenal audio link that it feels like you are in the
| same room. There's almost nothing to mess up, unlike the
| 3rd party conferencing and desktop sharing software that
| every time someone is not getting the sound/can't share the
| desktop/can't unmute the mic.
|
| BTW where I live currently, 4Mbps upstream is considered
| good and the remote desktop works fine on this connection.
| martinald wrote:
| This is what I mean though. You can't watch a video. This
| works flawlessly on RDP on Windows (will be a little
| compressed if you are on lower bandwidth). It's a fairly
| major problem if you're using it as your primary machine.
|
| Have you tried RDP? It is miles ahead of anything else
| I've seen.
| mrtksn wrote:
| I have not but I guess if I want to watch a video, why
| not stream it or download it on my actual machine?
| fakedang wrote:
| I assume the difference will be more prominent if you go
| into other applications such as cloud gaming.
|
| As an addendum, I ran Cyberpunk on my beaten down 4 year
| old ThinkPad 420 via an EC2 instance (specifically to
| test out the hypothesis) and it was faster than my usual
| usage on it.
| easton wrote:
| What if you use the system as your only computer, using
| other devices as thin clients? Windows/Linux has tons of
| different ways to optimize for this (RDP with
| acceleration, Citrix, LTSP/X forwarding), whereas the Mac
| doesn't. Which is fair, Apple didn't design the OS to be
| used that way, but it's an annoying drawback.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Dumb question - on assorted Linux or BSD OSs you can run
| xrdp against a VNC server. Would that work on a mac?
| martinald wrote:
| I don't think so, but I could be wrong. RDP on windows is
| accelerated (uses the clients graphics card) which makes
| it much more faster than VNC. VNC just basically sends a
| load of images of the screen in quick succession. It
| doesn't know really anything about the contents of them.
| agloeregrets wrote:
| I think technically speaking Mac Stadium does that. Pretty
| pricy vs just buying and restoring from time machine. It's
| arguable that the needed Mac gains to be worth it are
| probably more like every 3-4 years and you are throwing most
| of that away in Remoting in. The M1 is an inflection point
| too, I would just argue to buy a new Mac mini each time they
| update it (once every 4 years or so).
| martinald wrote:
| Primarily for CI/CD servers for mobile apps.
| woile wrote:
| Nice to see them on hackernews, I've been using their service for
| the last 2 months no issue so far.
|
| They even have an issue tracker answered by humans for all my
| inquires.
|
| Intuitive UI! Hope they keep growing, it'd be nice if they had
| some cluster outside europe as well
| hkt wrote:
| That there is a product coup. Impressive.
|
| They've still got all the good qualities of a startup but in most
| meaningful senses they now seem to have the scale and
| sophistication of offering their global competitors have. Today
| I'm on the cusp of launching something on there. I used them
| first for the cheap ARM instances (3eur a month or so) and now
| for their Kapsule offering. I avoided Amazon, Microsoft and
| Google out of a sense of moral indignation about their tax
| affairs.
|
| Declaration of interest: I've been using Scaleway for a few years
| now and really, really like them.
| simplecto wrote:
| I've been a customer for years and enjoy having access to their
| team via slack.
|
| I recommend giving them a spin-- nice to have players other than
| the big three cloud providers.
| hkt wrote:
| Came here to say much the same thing. They're a joy to deal
| with on Slack.
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