[HN Gopher] Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances
___________________________________________________________________
Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances
Author : ManishR
Score : 270 points
Date : 2021-12-02 16:43 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (aws.amazon.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (aws.amazon.com)
| eminence32 wrote:
| I have an slightly-off-topic question: If I want to test that my
| opensource project builds and runs on MacOS, what's the cheapest
| way for me to do this? AWS seems like a fairly expensive way do
| this at $15 USD per day
| asadlionpk wrote:
| probably just github actions: free!
| mcphage wrote:
| You don't need to leave the machine running (and billing)
| 24/7/365--turning it on for a few hours a day when you're
| building for it, or testing builds, should be enough.
| jffry wrote:
| From https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/mac/#Pricing:
|
| "Amazon EC2 Mac instances are available for purchase as
| Dedicated Hosts through On Demand and Savings Plans pricing
| models. Billing for EC2 Mac instances is per second with a
| 24-hour minimum allocation period to comply with the Apple
| macOS Software License Agreement"
| mcphage wrote:
| ...well, poop. That sucks.
| plorkyeran wrote:
| There's a minimum charge of 24 hours. macOS's license only
| permits renting the machine to a single buyer per day, so if
| you use it for five minutes then turn it off that machine is
| idle for the rest of the day.
| banana_giraffe wrote:
| Unlike other EC2 instances, you have to "reserve" a host, and
| the MAC instances require a minimum of a 24 hour reservation,
| that you pay for regardless of the instance state.
|
| It can be hard to justify $15.60 every time I want to test
| some random thing. Not to mention I seem to recall you can't
| actually cancel a reservation till the 24 hour window is up,
| so you need to remember to stop it the next day, or automate
| that action somehow.
| [deleted]
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| GitHub Actions
| [deleted]
| X-Istence wrote:
| Github Actions has macOS available as a builder.
| eminence32 wrote:
| If you need to interactively test something, can you do that
| with Github Actions?
| JacobCarlborg wrote:
| You can use this GitHub action [1] to get SSH access to a
| GitHub runner. If you need access to the GUI you should be
| able to use ngrok, perhaps with this GitHub action [2].
| I've tried tmate both with Linux and macOS runners. I've
| only tried ngrok with Linux runners.
|
| CircleCI supports macOS runners and has native support for
| rerunning failed builds with SSH access. So just setup a
| job that always fails.
|
| [1] https://github.com/marketplace/actions/debugging-with-
| tmate [2] https://github.com/marketplace/actions/ngrok-
| tunnel
| eminence32 wrote:
| Ahh, using tmate for this is very clever!
| mherdeg wrote:
| I guess you could buy a refurbished Mac Mini on apple.com for
| $589?
| zamadatix wrote:
| Scaleway has them for EUR2.4/day.
| icelusxl wrote:
| EUR49/month at Hetzner.
|
| https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-apple
| zamadatix wrote:
| + a EUR49 setup fee.
|
| I've never really understood Hetzner's offering, I can get
| paying EUR2.4 for a quick one off or a once a month build
| but I don't get how EUR98 + EUR49 per additional month is
| better than buying a Mac Mini on a payment plan.
| detaro wrote:
| If in a business context the alternative is "the CI macs,
| that sit in some corner of some office under a desk and
| hopefully don't get unplugged", maybe with a side of "and
| IT hates unapproved servers and also won't put our macs
| in their DC", I can see it making some sense.
| mhitza wrote:
| IMHO unplugged once or twice a month, or GitHub Actions
| being unavailable it's pretty much the same thing.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| It is straightforward to run an x86 macOS VM on Linux with QEMU
| & KVM. It's against the EULA to do so on non-Mac hardware, but
| technically it is possible.
| [deleted]
| savant_penguin wrote:
| Ignoring the actual news for a moment, this Amazon polly text to
| speech is absolutely fantastic
| nicoburns wrote:
| The 24 hour minimum pricing model for these really sucks. My
| understanding is that this is a condition of Apple's license to
| Amazon to run macOS on these machines, and I can't work out why
| they'd do it.
| reaperducer wrote:
| My guess is that its market research shows that for a
| profitable number of people, the 24-hour requirement isn't a
| big deal.
|
| It's not like Amazon doesn't have the ability or experience to
| research business decisions before they're made.
| detaro wrote:
| It's an Apple requirement (it applies to all rent-a-mac type
| services), I doubt Amazon would mind splitting it shorter
| (like they do with everything else) if they could.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| I bet a part is that apple genuinely doesn't want to deal with
| MacOS being a server OS so they want a little bit of "are you
| sure?" Requirements in there.
|
| A potentially bigger reason (for requiring 24hr) is to
| incentivize people who need a max for small bursts (eg build
| server, testing a website with safari etc) to just buy macs.
|
| I imagine a reason to require bare-metal hosting because
| everyone is lauding apple on how snappy and lively the M1 is
| and if they're split between N number of VMs then you may have
| a worse experience and apple is protecting that.
| willis936 wrote:
| It probably helps selling a false narrative to shareholders.
| "Look at how many hours our hardware was rented for!" with no
| regard for how many hours were actually spent doing work.
| jermaustin1 wrote:
| That makes no sense. Apple doesn't rent hardware.
| mcraiha wrote:
| I do not understand why Apple hates developers. There are many
| developers that need Mac machines for CI/CD, but Apple doesn't
| provide any reasonable solution.
| smoldesu wrote:
| How else are they supposed to force you to buy more units?
| saagarjha wrote:
| Apple gives themselves and GitHub special deals, which I
| guess is what they feel to be a reasonable solution.
| MBCook wrote:
| That's what XCode Cloud (now in beta for some users) is
| designed for.
| loudtieblahblah wrote:
| Apple hates it's users. Why should devs be any different?
| detaro wrote:
| Because they want you to buy your own macs.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| For now.. but they'll have their own cloud hosting (xcode
| cloud is a test). The AWS contract expires soon..
| neilalexander wrote:
| They aren't just firing up a virtual machine on over-
| provisioned hardware, they're dedicating an entire bare metal
| machine to you. It is in their interests to make that
| worthwhile commercially.
| pwojnaro wrote:
| It's entirely possible that the 24hr minimum is driven by the
| operational overhead, not just the licensing terms. Since
| this is bare metal, re-provisioning between customer sessions
| might require some level of human interaction, and this needs
| to be baked into the cost model of such a service.
| zamadatix wrote:
| These are Apple's terms that Amazon is following, not the
| other way around. You are getting bare metal that you have to
| reserve for a minimum of 24 hours because that's how Apple
| allows it to be licensed not because that's what Amazon
| thought would make the most sense.
| rektide wrote:
| I have such a hard time imagining what sick twisting legal
| crap allows Apple to dictate terms like this. Another
| example is Nvidia explicitly dis-allowing their consumer
| GPUs to be used in data-centers. It's wild to me that
| company's can just make up whatever terms of use they feel
| like & we have to accept that.
|
| Edit: oh hello, i'm at -4! Anyone care to defend your
| outrage at my outrage? What makes this seem at all ok? This
| seems so fundamentally screwy to me. Questions like how
| Apple is allowed to ban other browsers[1] show related type
| of confusion over the vast ecosystem control that seems to
| be spreading, but there at least there's some cloudy App
| Store Apple clearly retains some rights of control over.
|
| First-sale rights in America is fairly narrow in what they
| permit, but in America at least, there's very much been an
| idea that consumers become owners of the things they buy.
| It feels like a modern regression that there have been so
| many asterisks added to this straightforward & obvious
| right.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29419825
| qaq wrote:
| The term I would imagine applies to software not to the
| hardware
| messe wrote:
| > I have such a hard time imagining what sick twisting
| legal crap allows Apple to dictate terms like this.
| Another example is Nvidia explicitly dis-allowing their
| consumer GPUs to be used in data-centers. It's wild to me
| that company's can just make up whatever terms of use
| they feel like & we have to accept that.
|
| As far as I understand it, those EULA agreements aren't
| enforceable in the EU.
|
| That being said, NVIDIA don't have any obligation to sell
| to you in bulk if they find out you're installing
| consumer GPUs in a datacenter, so there's obviously an
| incentive to follow them.
| R0b0t1 wrote:
| I don't think they're enforceable in the US either. Once
| you have it you have it. This is what a sale legally is,
| it terminates the rights of the former owner. They can
| refuse to sell to you if they think you'll do something
| with it, but if you get it from them by lying or from a
| second hand sale they can't do anything.
|
| For software you can also have person A buy something,
| then give it to person B who didn't click a license
| agreement. But this isn't really necessary -- the case
| where Microsoft got slapped for motherboard locking
| Windows XP and had to undo it shows that if software is
| integral to the operation of a device rights to its use
| are transferred along with the sale of the item, much to
| the chagrin of CNC companies everywhere who have yet to
| be challenged on this.
|
| It's relatively common for companies to use shell
| companies or employees to buy hardware off the record for
| investigative purposes. Place I used to work at would
| investigate buyers for this reason (difference being we
| really did give our customers free reign with the
| equipment, we just had to try to stop fraud and other
| things).
| thuccess129 wrote:
| > Edit: oh hello, i'm at -4! Anyone care to defend your
| outrage at my outrage?
|
| The leadership sitting on a board with a mandatory
| retirement age at 65 who is 64 will lobby all involved to
| change that rule to keep going to 70. The terms are
| negotiable. You would have to think in our time of
| climate crisis that using 7 or 8 hours of a 24 hour slot
| and wasting all that energy for 16 hours is not something
| the law firm that negotiated the terms would be
| embarrassed by. To make it right, a regulator could force
| Apple to limit the rental minimum slot time according a
| labor board's idea of a programming work day at 7 to 16
| hours and not 24. Write a letter and email your
| politician?
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| Naive question: are these literally closets full of Macs? Or
| giant m1 MP servers?
| MBCook wrote:
| I don't think Apple would make anything like that so I'd assume
| racks of Mac Minis.
| sagz wrote:
| They are mac minis:
| https://d2908q01vomqb2.cloudfront.net/da4b9237bacccdf19c0760...
| emodendroket wrote:
| > EC2 M1 Mac instances are powered by a combination of two
| hardware components:
|
| >The Mac mini, featuring M1 SoC with 8 CPU cores, 8 GPU cores,
| 16 GiB of memory, and a 16 core Apple Neural Engine.
|
| >The AWS Nitro System, providing up to 10 Gbps of VPC network
| bandwidth and 8 Gbps of EBS storage bandwidth through a high-
| speed Thunderbolt connection.
| barkingcat wrote:
| there is no giant m1 mp servers yet.
|
| with the Apple ecosystem, you get what they give you. There's
| no other way.
| bazhova wrote:
| There was a YT video about a year ago when they first released
| the EC2 mac instances, and they showed a clip of someone
| unloading a truck full of mac minis on a forklift. It is really
| just a bunch of mac minis in a sled. Nothing special going on
| here.
| DrBazza wrote:
| I came here to ask the same thing. So if Apple don't make a
| rackable M1 server, what do they themselves use? It seems a bit
| unlikely Apple would have racks of minis as well.
| barkingcat wrote:
| Inside Apple no one knows (except for Apple employees and
| contractors, who are bound by employment contracts and nda's)
|
| Outside of Apple, it's just whatever you see them selling on
| apple.com
| mbreese wrote:
| You can literally buy a rack count tray for Mac Minis on
| Amazon, so I'd assume AWS mounts them in racks. It's not the
| cleanest model, but Mac mini's are smaller than 1U (1.4" vs
| 1.75"). They are also much cleaner to rack than the old trash
| can Mac Pros.
|
| (Non affiliate link to a randomly chosen example)
|
| Mac Mini Rack Mount, UCTRONICS 19" 1U Rackmount Supports 2
| Units of All Mac Mini M1 and The Previous Models
|
| https://www.amazon.com/dp/B093GQ8TJC
| meatmanek wrote:
| According to a sysadmin I interviewed several years ago, they
| use standard x86 server hardware from other vendors like
| Dell. If I recall correctly (there's a good chance I'm
| misremembering), they ran something like VMware, and ran
| Linux and OS X in VMs.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Oh right: Apple isn't constrained by their own license
| terms, so there's no reason _they_ couldn 't run Mac OS
| virtual machines at any scale on any hardware they wanted.
| Up to and including things that you would otherwise
| probably call "perfect Hackintosh" builds, since they can
| build _actual_ Mac OS images with the hardware checks
| disabled, paravirtualization drivers, whatever.
| my123 wrote:
| See Xcode Cloud for example: running on qemu (w/ a linux
| host) on Ice Lake server Xeons.
| emodendroket wrote:
| Yeah, this is huge, especially for hobbyists. The M1 is a great
| laptop but being freed from buying one just to build for iOS is
| still cool.
| mmastrac wrote:
| You need to dedicate the instance for a full 24 hours, so if
| you're doing daily builds you'll probably end up paying for a
| mac mini every month.
|
| Not that I'd ever do or recommend it in a commercial setting,
| but hobbyists should probably just fire up something like
| https://github.com/kholia/OSX-KVM to do builds.
| mciancia wrote:
| Meh, I don't think that too many things that AWS is releasing
| are at all relevant for hobbyist because of pricing. I
|
| n this case, you need to pay at least 16 usd for running this
| because of 24h limitation, so for example using scaleway
| (2.4EUR for 24h) or just buying a mac mini probably is gonna be
| cheaper overall
| cehrlich wrote:
| Genuinely curious, who is the audience for this? Large iOS dev
| shops who want hardware to run builds on and don't mind that you
| need to reserve them for at least 24 hours at a time?
| jenny91 wrote:
| Large shops that already run on AWS and where iOS/mac is a
| small part so they'd rather dish out a few $100k for someone
| else to manage and have it homogeneous through their other
| systems.
| ghaff wrote:
| And it's a standard service that any of their developers can
| access as needed without needing to either setup their own
| Macs as a service in a lab or distributing standardized Macs
| for testing/builds/etc.
|
| For a small shop it probably makes more sense to just buy the
| Macs, especially if they do a lot of iOS/OSX development.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| Large companies who also make their own app... like Amazon.
| Who are known for selling their own internal tools. ;)
| _alex_ wrote:
| CI/CD for ios apps
| bmj wrote:
| My employer really wants to use this. The IT department
| dislikes supporting Apple hardware and software. But...we have
| a product that needs to end up in the Apple App Store. They
| tried to convince the iOS engineers that it would be fine to
| work in a virtualized environment (and cheaper), but we really
| were not convinced that would be workable in the long run. I
| was willing to give it a shot, but the effort eventually
| fizzled out, likely over Amazon's costs.
| gotstad wrote:
| Well it's anecdotal, but yes, our company fits directly into
| that space. You might ask why we don't want to just have the
| hardware in-house, but since we're developing Software as
| Medical Device products for iOS, we'd rather qualify Amazon as
| a critical supplier than try to operate the activity ourselves
| (with all the controls that come with doing so).
| withinrafael wrote:
| GitHub Actions uses VMs. Not sure how they, and not Amazon, were
| able to pull this off. That subject is sensitive and reportedly
| under NDA. https://github.com/actions/virtual-
| environments/issues/2604#...
| ecshafer wrote:
| It's obviously under NDA. I don't even understand why someone
| would open up this issue. How is Github complying with Mac os
| license? The obvious answer is that Github worked something out
| with Apple, that would then be secret. Github (Microsoft) has
| many lawyers under their employ that would have looked at this,
| said if their implementation breaks the license, or they came
| up with an alternative license with Apple. It seems weird that
| people jump up to gotcha questions between two $Trillion corps.
| withinrafael wrote:
| I opened the issue because when I spun up a macOS runner, it
| was not requiring me to "review and agree to be bound by the
| terms applicable to any software preinstalled on the Apple
| Software [...]" per the terms. Was I somehow implicitly bound
| by them? I was not comfortable with that legal risk and
| figured I'd ask the awkward question.
| unbanned wrote:
| More likely you just wanted to gotcha at Microsoft to make
| yourself look smart... just being nitpicky and awkward is
| how it looks.
|
| Judging by your blog, this doesn't seem far from the truth.
| AyyWS wrote:
| Makes me think of Azure VMware Solution by CloudSimple. I
| wish I knew the details, but it was apparently unsupported by
| VMware.
| balls187 wrote:
| > Not sure how they, and not Amazon
|
| Pure speculation, but Microsoft and Apple have long standing
| working relationship, in a way that Amazon just doesn't have.
| conradev wrote:
| Amazon and Apple do have a long and storied relationship,
| featuring both collusion and competition:
|
| 1. https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/30/21348108/apple-amazon-
| pri...
|
| 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Apple_Inc.
|
| 3. https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/9/18079340/amazon-apple-
| iph...
| GhettoComputers wrote:
| Microsoft owns a significant amount of Apple stock.
| simondotau wrote:
| Citation?
|
| Remember in 1997, Microsoft invested 150 million dollars into
| Apple to appease regulators? They sold it in 2003 for a tidy
| 550 million dollars. Nice return on investment!
|
| If they didn't sell it, it would be worth approximately 130
| BILLION dollars today.
| GhettoComputers wrote:
| Looks like you're right, MS liquidated it a long time ago,
| and I mixed up Gates and MS, but if we call 5% as lowest
| amount of significance or how it was non voting stock it
| still isn't a good point I made.
|
| https://au.finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-founder-bill-
| gat...
| yakkomajuri wrote:
| Hope the NDA they referred to didn't have a clause about "not
| acknowledging the existence of the NDA" that many do. :D
| mike_d wrote:
| I believe you are thinking of a NSL (National Security
| Letter). I've never seen an NDA that compelled secrecy
| regarding the agreement itself.
| jefftk wrote:
| It is definitely a thing, and I may or may not have signed
| one
| mike_d wrote:
| Sorry I should have been more explicit. I've seen all
| sorts of dumb shit in NDAs. What I meant to say was I've
| never seen that kind of language in an NDA drafted by a
| decent lawyer that expected it to be enforceable.
|
| Competent legal council would have the whole thing
| invalidated because you cannot mount a legal defense to a
| document you can't acknowledge the existence of in open
| court. Judges only let that stuff fly when you risk human
| life or judicial process, not in civil cases.
| handrous wrote:
| Maybe it's to guard against the possibility of revealing
| what's covered by an NDA by answering yes or no to
| increasingly-detailed questions about what is and isn't
| covered by the NDA?
| simondotau wrote:
| I'm not familiar with GitHub Actions but if you can't directly
| interact with the MacOS operating system, then wouldn't it
| really be GitHub "using" the operating system, not you?
| slimsag wrote:
| I believe that Apple internally has plans to compete with AWS
| and Google Cloud in the long term, but with M1 chips. There
| have been rumors[0][1] about this, and it's a logical step.
|
| Not a far leap to speculate that Microsoft/GitHub has been
| granted early access to that program.
|
| [0] https://seekingalpha.com/article/4466949-new-leak-
| suggests-a...
|
| [1] https://www.macrumors.com/2021/06/16/apple-planning-to-
| rival...
| ksec wrote:
| I seriously, seriously doubt that.
|
| Apple has needs for serving 1+ Billion of its customers. IS&T
| has been known to be a complete pile of crap ( plenty of
| evidence on HN alone ). A dozens of hiring seems more to me
| like trying to fix things rather than compete. The will need
| hundreds if not thousands as bare minimum.
|
| They have been pitting Azure against AWS and GCP against
| Azure to gain extremely favourable terms.
| minhazm wrote:
| They're already doing it somewhat with Xcode Cloud, which
| does remote builds in Apple's infrastructure[1]. They might
| not directly compete with AWS, Azure or GCP in products one
| to one, but it's not unreasonable to assume they will
| expand their cloud offerings in this space over time.
|
| [1] https://developer.apple.com/xcode-cloud/
| speedgoose wrote:
| Many months later and more than 5 times more expensive than
| Scaleway though.
|
| https://www.scaleway.com/en/hello-m1/
| xeromal wrote:
| But I can do everything I need in one system with AWS.
| speedgoose wrote:
| Yes, many people find value in being locked down with a
| single cloud provider. It can make sense, but sometimes you
| don't need the AWS ecosystem and just need an online server.
| GhettoComputers wrote:
| If you're testing software on an M1, what is the benefit of
| AWS?
| ithkuil wrote:
| Perhaps you have other stuff on AWS, in a VPC, that is
| administered by an operations team which is several tickets
| away from you and/or you have to talk with seven layers of
| management before you convince anybody that a VPN peering
| with a cloud provider may be cheaper than the hours you
| just wasted with expensive meetings just used to discuss
| the possibility of setting up a VPN peering let alone
| actually executing it and maintaining it...
|
| Yeah, many companies will gladly pay an inflated per
| instance price as long as every else flows smoothly
| Nextgrid wrote:
| I'm assuming there are no data transfer fees. If your M1
| workload needs significant data, that alone could make it
| cheaper than having a cheaper external M1 and then paying
| every time you move data out of AWS into it.
| GhettoComputers wrote:
| Looks great, can I use it as an instance to send and receive
| iMessage? I could do it with my computer at home but if I can
| set it as a trigger able instance every few minutes to send and
| receive iMessage it would be pretty cool for serving iMessage
| to Android.
| tcbawo wrote:
| If someone could offer this as a service, I would pay for it.
| I get a lot of social pressure from family and certain friend
| groups due to being one of the few non-iPhone users.
| handrous wrote:
| My friend group solved some people using Android phones by
| moving entirely to WhatsApp, years ago.
| GhettoComputers wrote:
| Beeper does offer this service, but you can self host it
| for much less.
| michaeljgerace wrote:
| Look into BlueBubbles or AirMessage.
| nostrebored wrote:
| And then as an enterprise I have to build in my IAM, auditing,
| artifact generation, etc. into the solution. I will pay the 5x.
| speedgoose wrote:
| In your case you should probably pay the 5.7x yes (and
| probably more when you consider bandwidth).
| tyingq wrote:
| It is half the RAM (8GB vs 16GB), but EUR0.10/Hour is still
| attractive.
| samcrawford wrote:
| Hetzner's offering is competitive too. 58 EUR/mo at
| https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-apple
| bogwog wrote:
| If M1 macs were like iPhones, where a new one was released every
| year, I could see it maybe being useful to pay for something like
| this.
|
| But since they aren't, and since an M1 mini only costs $699, it
| doesn't make sense to me. If you use it 24/7, even the cheapest
| provider is going to be more expensive than just buying one (or
| 3)
|
| Even if you only use it for building/compiling iOS software, it's
| probably still cheaper to buy one because even if Apple releases
| a new model, the model you can buy today is still going to be
| good for building for at least half a decade. Also, if there is a
| new model, the old model will drop in price!
|
| AND even if you don't have the cash to buy a $700 computer, you
| can still probably find a way to finance the purchase for a lower
| monthly payment than whatever this type of service would cost.
|
| Does anyone have a real world example where a service like this
| makes sense? (Even if it were cheaper than AWS's prices)
| handrous wrote:
| Mac automation for things like CI is a pain in the ass (at
| least for small businesses) and their virtualization story for
| e.g. older version of the OS blows, despite having had a built-
| in hypervisor for a really long time.
|
| "Load this specific OS, install these other programs, download
| some data, get it to this overall state, then run this script
| and send the output somewhere else, then destroy it when you're
| done" is actually a pretty big pain to do with macOS, without
| paying _someone_. Not that rentable M1 Macs solve that problem,
| exactly, but rentable, managed Macs in general can be useful
| for this, when you 're renting from places with the automation
| in place to do easy virtualization or re-imaging.
| mattficke wrote:
| CI is what comes to mind. If you want to run tests or build
| artifacts on a Mac every time any developer pushes a commit,
| you really need something remote rather than a physical device
| on your desk.
| Maakuth wrote:
| If you need to run a CI server or something, the cost of the
| hardware itself is not nearly the only cost you have. With
| this, you have it hooked up in reliable power supply, very good
| network connectivity and all the other physical concerns
| abstracted away.
| cavisne wrote:
| They mentioned the main use case when they launched the initial
| Mac ec2 instances.
|
| Any company that does something on iOS/macos needs mac hardware
| to run builds on, there is no other (legal) option. The status
| quo (even at very large companies) is some mac mini's under
| someones desk/in a closet somewhere.
|
| This is basically replacing the cost of that setup (ie the
| oncall for it/hassle). The AWS service is even more expensive
| than things like MacStadium because you also get AWS network
| connectivity and other features.
| rsync wrote:
| Is this really true?
|
| There really isn't a cross compiling chain that would allow
| me to build a macOS app on a freebsd system (for instance) ?
| bogwog wrote:
| I've manually done it before (on Linux). Technologically
| it's not that hard to do, but _legally_ is where it becomes
| a problem. IIRC the Xcode license (which applies to the iOS
| SDKs) requires you to use them on Apple branded computers.
|
| I don't know why Apple cares so much about that, especially
| since they're already collecting their yearly $100 tax from
| developers on top of the 30% revenue cut. I guess at their
| size, extracting every last penny is how you get to a
| trillion dollar valuation?
|
| So unless you have a strong legal defense ready, you should
| probably just pay Apple.
|
| EDIT: I should clarify that by "it's not that hard to do",
| I mean that it's easy because someone else already did the
| hard part :)
|
| https://github.com/tpoechtrager/cctools-port
| pbalau wrote:
| No. If you want to build things for the Apple ecosystem,
| you need to use the Apple ecosystem.
| tosh wrote:
| > EC2 M1 Mac instances are now available in preview in US East
| (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon), with other AWS Regions coming
| at launch.
|
| Pricing metrics are similar to the previous generation of EC2 Mac
| instances. You are charged per hour of reservation of the
| dedicated host, not for the time the instance is running, and
| there is a minimum charge of 24 hours for reserving a dedicated
| host.
|
| In the two preview Regions, the on-demand price is $0.6498 per
| hour. You can save up to 42 percent over the on-demand price with
| Savings Plans. Check our Dedicated Host on-demand pricing page,
| as well as the Savings Plans page to learn the details.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Every time I look at the AWS prices page or at its control panel,
| I feel like I need to get a special advanced degree to understand
| a thing.
| kovek wrote:
| I just learned that I need to pay aws 400$ for last month. I
| was thinking it would be 50$.
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| It's a very special kind of evil. They can always argue it's
| your fault, because you haven't read something, you
| misunderstood something. There are even stories circulating
| of people who lost their life savings by mistake but the AWS
| team charitably decided they will forgive them just this
| time, how nice of them!
|
| Everybody knows it's complex to their advantage, they are not
| stupid - but they can always defend themselves using the
| flexibility card. I don't believe a class action would ever
| happen.
| selimnairb wrote:
| Yes, the "let's hook up your credit card to the Internet"
| part of cloud computing still makes me nervous.
| smilespray wrote:
| You're not alone. Feels like it's on purpose.
| bstar77 wrote:
| After my experience 3 years ago, I will never use them again. I
| priced out an instance that estimated around $30/month via
| their calculator. Instance is indeed around $30 for the first 2
| months, then I get a $200 bill. I don't know what the hell
| happened, but it was over 6x what I had budgeted. I tried to
| get someone to review my account, but I didn't get a response
| and just had to suck it up. I paid the $200 and moved on. Never
| again, I'll use Linode or something else instead.
|
| I clearly did something wrong, but the process was so confusing
| that I couldn't tell you what it was. It probably had to do
| with running the server at sub-optimal times when rates were
| higher, but I don't remember reading anything about that. It
| was a Windows-based game server, so the extra cpu overhead
| might have had something to do with it.
| whalesalad wrote:
| The disk you attach to an instance is not free, and
| capacity/performance characteristics dictate price.
| nix23 wrote:
| Just try Oracle Cloud believe me...it's so much better.
| danielheath wrote:
| It's not any more straightforward to use IME, and I have
| had an instance vanish without a trace in the past 4
| months.
|
| It is, however, far cheaper and has more transparent
| pricing.
| jedberg wrote:
| There are entire consulting businesses based on the idea of
| helping people understand their AWS bill.
|
| But I'm not sure what the tradeoff is. They have a lot of
| services with a lot of options. The pricing is designed to meet
| everyone's needs.
| gunapologist99 wrote:
| > The pricing is designed to meet everyone's needs.
|
| That's a surprisingly charitable interpretation.
| stillicidious wrote:
| It's a valid one. Engineering teams work with AWS kinda in
| the same way mass market 90s C code was written. They get
| it running, but boy are there huge leaks and crashes hiding
| in plain sight.
|
| From that perspective, I think it might be ok to say that
| most eng folk complaining about AWS billing need a safer
| language (higher level abstraction) where they are
| protected from causing harm or being harmed.
| handrous wrote:
| > There are entire consulting businesses based on the idea of
| helping people understand their AWS bill.
|
| More broadly, there's a whole cottage industry of businesses
| that exist _only_ because the UI for the major cloud
| providers is _terrible_. Stuff like security auditing or even
| telling exactly WTF is going on (let alone over time) is so
| painful that it 's worth paying someone else to provide a
| better UI. Same for billing.
| PowerfulWizard wrote:
| One thing that would make a difference on small accounts is
| the ability to do prepaid billing only. That way you define
| your budget in advance and they enforce it. The problem with
| the current billing is that people who are new to the system
| have no hope of understanding what is going on and they have
| to accept the open-ended nature of the billing system to
| learn.
| danielheath wrote:
| AWS Lightsail is pretty close to this. It's still possible
| to get an overage if you have a lot of traffic, but
| otherwise it's pretty safe.
| ericd wrote:
| Their egress bandwidth pricing definitely wasn't designed to
| meet my needs. I forget how many orders of magnitude above
| market it was when I priced it out, but it was ugly.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| I think there is a class action law suit waiting to happen to
| be honest, it's clearly deliberate and everyone who has set up
| AWS personally is being charged $2-5 per month for services
| that are still running but they cannot find.
|
| As long as Jeff gets richer.
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| Use a service with max cap built in such as Hetzner. [0]
|
| [0] https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/mac-mini-m1
| chx wrote:
| https://twitter.com/br_/status/979442438254166016
|
| > "selling AWS at a loss" is crisp shorthand for a lot of
| startups' business models!
| tedivm wrote:
| I'm honestly at the point where I assume the AWS Console is
| awful on purpose as a way to drive people towards
| infrastructure as code. It's just so awful that it can't be on
| purpose (I hope).
| etxm wrote:
| Wait until they see how awful IaC is.
| wooptoo wrote:
| To be honest I'm more impressed by the Polly TTS widget at the
| top. The neural version is incredibly good.
| johnthuss wrote:
| This is great, but since x86 Macs were already available this is
| mostly just a price reduction. But it's great to have these
| available at Amazon.
| morganvachon wrote:
| M1/AArch64 is the future of Mac hardware, this is AWS following
| the path. Devs targeting the macOS desktop should be focused on
| M1 native exclusively unless long term support of X86_64 Macs
| is part of their product's support options.
| johnthuss wrote:
| I have to assume the primary use for these VMs is to build
| iOS applications not Mac apps. For that use case the CPU
| architecture used to run the build doesn't really matter
| since the end product is an arm64 iOS app regardless.
|
| Sure, you can use it for testing and building Mac apps, but
| the number of people doing that is minuscule compared to the
| number of iOS developers (unfortunately).
| jlokier wrote:
| I'm fairly sure most Mac users are running non-M1 hardware,
| and that will continue for a few more years.
|
| Even the earliest M1 Air has been out for less time than most
| people's laptop replacement time, and MBP users are very
| unlikely to have an M1 MBP yet.
|
| Assuming that's correct, exclusively targeting M1 implies
| ignoring most potential customers for a few years to come.
| retskrad wrote:
| The Apple Silicon is Tim Cook's magnum opus.
| dougmwne wrote:
| It's an interesting look at AWS pricing since the cost of the M1
| Mac Mini ($699) and it's power consumption (avg 26 watts) are
| known. Based on hardware costs (significant) and power costs
| (insignificant) you're looking at a hardware ROI at about 6
| months from the $.65 per hour price. AWS has an estimated 60%
| gross profit margin, so from there it's probably possible to
| estimate some other interesting things about their costs,
| utilization rate and depreciation schedule.
|
| Edit: Sorry, my napkin math assumed a unstated utilization rate
| of 40 hours per week, but that's not a great assumption due to
| the 24 hour minimum. Still, some proportion of machines will be
| idle, though 75% idle seems like a bad guess.
| markonen wrote:
| The Mac mini itself is not the only hardware cost for AWS here,
| though: I wouldn't be surprised if their Thunderbolt Nitro
| hardware cost just as much each. It has to be a very low volume
| device (relative to other things AWS does).
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Considering Thunderbolt is just PCI-Express, I'd expect it to
| be standard Nitro hardware (whatever that is) plus an
| inexpensive PCIe to Thunderbolt board/adapter.
| mciancia wrote:
| W8 what
|
| >>> 699/(24*0.65)
|
| 44.80769230769231 days
|
| Nitro card obviously costs a bit, but for ROI on mac itself is
| closer to 6 weeks than 6 months ;)
| riazrizvi wrote:
| > 699/(24*0.65) * proportion of hours the product is unused
| dougmwne wrote:
| Yup, sorry I was assuming 40 hours of utilization a week,
| forgot to state that.
| luhn wrote:
| Unfortunately Mac instances have a minimum billing
| duration of 24 hours, so even if you only use it 8am-5pm,
| you'd be billed for 8am-8am. (Not AWS's fault, it's part
| of the Apple EULA.)
| konschubert wrote:
| What is apple's motivation?
| 988747 wrote:
| Probably they are deliberately trying to make M2 EC2
| instances expensive to avoid all their Mac Minis being
| bought out by AWS, they get higher profit margins selling
| to retail customers.
| lucky_cloud wrote:
| Money. Disabling a Mac for 24 hours after 10 minutes of
| use means you have to buy much more hardware than you'd
| have to if a single Mac could be utilized by many people
| for short periods of time. Some users would use a single
| Mac for days/weeks/months but others will want to boot,
| run a build, and be done. The actual work might take 5
| minutes or 3 hours but you pay for a day no matter what.
|
| Days where you're doing the same short-lived task many
| times won't be as expensive per build, but if you just
| want to do a nightly build, you're paying for months or
| years and utilizing a fraction of the compute time you're
| buying.
| garaetjjte wrote:
| Hypothetically, if AWS instead installed Linux on these,
| could they disregard Apple's EULA?
| luhn wrote:
| I would think so, but IANAL.
|
| But what would be the point of running Linux on a Mac
| Mini on AWS?
| stingraycharles wrote:
| To be fair, since the minimum rent time of these instances
| in the cloud is 24h, chances are even a cloud-provided
| instance is unused for quite some time.
| [deleted]
| JCM9 wrote:
| This is really not looking at the math in the right way for
| those that are the target market. If you just want an M1
| instance just because sure just go buy one and keep in plugged
| in all the time in your basement. That's not the target market.
|
| Imagine you're developing an app in regulated market and need
| to have Macs for CI/CD There's a lot more to this than just
| keeping some Mac mini's under your desk. How are you managing
| physical security in your environment? Do you have all the
| associated certifications in place? Can we see your last audit?
| Who's fixing this when something breaks? What about your in
| house IT folks that done want to build out a whole new
| operation to manage Macs now? What if next week you need 5x as
| many instances but only for 2 days? That's what your paying for
| in the price here, not just the cost of the instance itself and
| power.
|
| When faced with all those requirements and challenges the
| pricing looks inexpensive.
| nojito wrote:
| Apple already offers this for Devs.
|
| https://developer.apple.com/xcode-cloud/
| mattferderer wrote:
| So does MS with Azure Devops & GitHub:
| https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
| us/azure/devops/pipelines/ecos...
| https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/pipelines-
| xcode/blob/master...
|
| It's great that there are finally multiple ways to do this
| without needing to buy a bunch of Macs just for compiling.
| oblio wrote:
| If you're already using AWS it's a no-brainer to avoid a
| second vendor if you don't have to use them for other
| reasons.
| davej wrote:
| Another datapoint is that Scaleway charges EUR.10 per hour
| ($.113) for their M1 instances, this is roughly one-sixth of
| what AWS is charging.
| tyingq wrote:
| The Scaleway offering has 8GB versus the AWS 16GB. Not that
| it changes the math that much, but it's worth noting.
| riknos314 wrote:
| Maybe, there's still a lot of unknowns. The cost and power
| consumption of the nitro hardware to translate from the mac
| mini to everything else being the main one.
|
| They're also likely pricing in some form of opportunity cost
| since the density of physical macs per unit rack space is
| almost certainly lower than the density of typical server
| hardware.
| droopyEyelids wrote:
| The space question is interesting.
|
| The most common Mac mini rack mount enclosure holds 2 minis
| in 1ru. I think at amazon's scale they could probably get 4
| minis in 1ru with some custom cooling.
|
| how dense do you think instances are on average in the amazon
| datacenters?
| sieabahlpark wrote:
| Why would you not put them on their side and stack them
| like hard drives? You'd get way more density that way then
| trying to figure out how to make it fit in 1u for no
| reason. You could even stack multiple rows deep to get more
| density.
| adolph wrote:
| 19 mod 1.4 = 0.8, 0.8 x 7.7 = 6.16 in^2
|
| 19 mod 7.7 = 3.6, 3.6 x 1.4 = 5.04 in^2
|
| Presumably the greater waste of bottom side down is in
| higher number of shelves?
| tyingq wrote:
| >The most common Mac mini rack mount enclosure holds 2
| minis in 1ru
|
| That sounds wasteful to me. Is that really the most common
| way for mac hosting companies to do it?
| technobabbler wrote:
| Do they have an alternative?
| pantalaimon wrote:
| They could simply ditch the case, the board alone is
| pretty small.
| tyingq wrote:
| I imagine you could get 4 in 1U if you used all the
| depth, and perhaps more dense by putting them onto their
| side in 4U (maybe 5U..not sure how tall a M1 Mini is). I
| don't know to what degree cooling is an issue, where you
| don't want the exhaust of one feeding the inlet of
| another.
| runako wrote:
| https://www.macstadium.com/datacenters
|
| There's an image there that appears to have the units
| mounted sideways for perhaps 6 minis in 2 RU?
| chx wrote:
| At Amazon scale, I imagine they strip the original
| chassis and use only the motherboard with custom power
| and cooling for some insane density. As visible here
| https://youtu.be/R4ArjHz4gd4?t=192 you could save some
| significant space doing so.
| jpraczyk wrote:
| Sorry to disappoint you https://www.servethehome.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2020/12/AWS-...
| tyingq wrote:
| Seems like it would have to be 5U if sideways...the M1
| minis are 7.7 inches / 19.7cm tall.
| Megatio wrote:
| Its probably much more custom than other hardware.
|
| I have never seen any business/professional mac hardware
| deployment which doesn't look custom build with some magic
| around it.
|
| That alone might be much more expensive and needs a dedicated
| team.
| ineedasername wrote:
| That is a premium price if you're using it 40hr/week. Although,
| asumming they're available for custom AMI, maybe the value-add
| use case for this is to be able to have multiple custom AMIs
| for different dev environments and scenarios to rapidly spin up
| what you need.
|
| Specifically for testing with multiple versions of MacOS: you
| could develop the code and then test on a custom AMI to make
| sure it ran in the version of MacOS, no need to have multiple
| systems setup. (Although I don't know much about Mac dev-- does
| Apple provide tools to do such testing already without running
| multiple OS versions?)
|
| Otherwise, I guess it's all just about convenience.
| monocasa wrote:
| There's a rumor going around that they're heavily discounting
| arm64 instances in order to put negotiating pressure on the x86
| manufacturers. 'Nice arch you have there, would be a shame if
| people stopped caring.'
|
| I would be careful about estimating beyond how they view arm64
| given that these are the highest perf/core arm64 devices they
| can put their hands on.
| hoffspot wrote:
| I think they are providing those discounts to promote their
| own silicon, the Graviton3 chip. You definitely get an
| execution discount in Lambda for selecting arm versus x86 on
| that basis.
| monocasa wrote:
| The rumor is that their own silicon isn't really that much
| better on perf/watt, but they're discounting it as a multi
| pronged effort to put pressure on the x86 vendors. If it
| turns out it's a lot of pressure and it kills x86, then
| they've commodified their complement. If it's just a
| threat, then they have a better seat at the negotiating
| table.
| Rafuino wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised if they're pricing them below cost
| like they have done with Alexa products.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| I'd guess they pay much more than this due to some
| licensing/t&c issue. I haven't read them but I speculate that
| they same something to the effect of you can't make it
| accessible to the public as a shared, paid for resource etc and
| that amazon has a separate agreement and they pay more.
| AyyWS wrote:
| Thinking back to the VMware service provider licensing I saw,
| Apple probably charges a subscription model that would make
| your eyes bleed. I was shocked anyone could afford to sell a
| public cloud offering that used VMware technology after
| seeing their pricing.
| tyingq wrote:
| _" EC2 M1 Mac instances are powered by...The Mac mini,
| featuring M1 SoC with 8 CPU cores, 8 GPU cores, 16 GiB of
| memory"_
|
| So not $699, but $899, since it's 16GB of memory.
| mciancia wrote:
| For retail, true. I would be surprised if amazon actually
| pays that much
| ksec wrote:
| Normal whole sale price, at best would be something like
| $799.
| GhettoComputers wrote:
| Based on what?
| sgjohnson wrote:
| Based on Apple not giving a shit what volume you're
| buying, the price is the price.
|
| Maybe the rules are a bit different for Amazon, but I
| wouldn't bet on it.
| GhettoComputers wrote:
| Based on what?
|
| https://www.apple.com/us-hed/store
|
| https://images.apple.com/business-
| docs/VPP_Business_Guide.pd...
|
| https://www.apple.com/retail/business/
|
| > Our Small Business Experts are ready to help. They'll
| advise you on the devices to fit your budget, including
| special pricing,* and find you the best financing option.
| All backed by ongoing support to give you much-needed
| peace of mind.
|
| > * Special pricing available to qualified customers. To
| learn more about how to start qualifying toward special
| pricing, talk to a Business Team member in a store or
| give us a call at 1-800-854-3680.
| sgjohnson wrote:
| The point was that it's a marginal discount. I never said
| that there's no discount.
| GhettoComputers wrote:
| > Based on Apple not giving a shit what volume you're
| buying, the price is the price.
|
| That isn't what you said.
| rektide wrote:
| So cool to imagine there's just a regular old Nitro accelerator,
| but it happens to be plugged in over thunderbolt in this case.
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