Hopefully this includes alternate versions of OSX for testing purposes? Then I can really see this being useful. Running a bunch of versions is hard / expensive.
Rent a Mac in the cloud for development
151–160 of 177 posts
Re: Rent a Mac in the cloud for development
#152I'm looking for a good solution for continuous integration of OS X/iOS builds. By the looks of these comments, this isn't it. Does anyone have more worthy suggestions?
I'm launching such specific solution – http://hosted-ci.com/
Re: Rent a Mac in the cloud for development
#153So let's see who your potential customer is: - Someone who owns a computer, with a monitor, a keyboard and a mouse (of course) - Someone with a decent internet access - Someone who has either invested or going to invested 100's of hours to properly learn the iOS/Mac frameworks - Someone who is hoping to either make a living off his Mac development or threats this as in important hobby - Someone who will be able to af…
Yes, you're missing something. I run a small iOS contracting shop that does continuous integration. When the contracting market is good, we never have enough build servers, which can only be Macs. Virtualization only gets us so far. There IS NO aws / EC2 service for macs. I can't just spin up some instances to handle the load and spin down after the engineers go home. The options are literally run to the Apple store…
BTW, maybe you'll be interested – I develop hosted continuos integration service specifically for iOS / Mac developers, see it here http://hosted-ci.com/
Re: Rent a Mac in the cloud for development
#154How would one deploy a iOS app using this service? It seems interesting since i don't own a Mac and am interested in iOS Development, but don't want to fork out the cash for a mac mini or something similar.
I just pirated a copy of OS X and installed it in a VM under my Linux/Windows dual boot (the VirtualBox VM file can be opened in either Linux or Windows). I don't know about laptops, but with a decent desktop (probably cost me ~$1000 to build it ~6 months ago with components from Newegg and Amazon, but $500 would be sufficient), you can virtualize OS X without any problems.
Re: Rent a Mac in the cloud for development
#155I run OS X on VMWare, it's fast, it's perfect. I wonder if they're doing the same (virtualized OS X, which works well but is, I believe, against Apple's EULAs) or if they use actual Macs (which would be quite burdensome)...? Edit: confused iOS and OS X. I feel stupid.
Which version/edition of OSX are you using? I tried this with a couple of original DVDs and pirated copies, but none of them would boot properly under VirtualBox.
Re: Rent a Mac in the cloud for development
#156I run OS X on VMWare, it's fast, it's perfect. I wonder if they're doing the same (virtualized OS X, which works well but is, I believe, against Apple's EULAs) or if they use actual Macs (which would be quite burdensome)...? Edit: confused iOS and OS X. I feel stupid.
Virtualized OS X is allowed within limitations. 10.6 required the Server version to be (legally) virtualized, while 10.7 allows 2 extra copies to be virtualized. In both cases, the host needs to be OS X, on Apple hardware.
Re: Rent a Mac in the cloud for development
#157hahaha, the existence of this service... are macs expensive? How expensive are they really? "Yo a desktop mac is so expensive there's this service to give DEVELOPERS (knowledge workers) access to one on TIMESHARE." Like real estate.
Re: Rent a Mac in the cloud for development
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
You'd need to import certificates every time you booted the VM (I assume) which would get old pretty quickly. Edit - looks like there is persistent on-VM storage, from the homepage: "In additional to local hard drive space..."
It's unclear if that local space is shared with others that might be logging in after you though. Really cool concept overall, but there's a good amount of uncertainty in there. There's a handful of gramatical errors too, so maybe they aren't really ready to launch?
Why wouldn't it be like unix where each user has their stuff in their home directory. OSX already has this concept with user switching. This just allows you to login as multiple users on an OSX machine at the same time.
Re: Rent a Mac in the cloud for development
#159Gonna be brutally honest here, those pricing plans are shit. Allow me to log in for an unlimited amount of time and lower the price a bit, and we'll talk.
While you are at it, get me a cup of coffee... Aren't you asking for a bit too much (specially on the "lower the price" bit.
I really don't think it's asking to much. Maybe they could charge a smaller amount for command line/shell only access.
The premium you're paying here seems like it's just to stream the OSX GUI over the RDP protocol.
Re: Rent a Mac in the cloud for development
#160So let's see who your potential customer is: - Someone who owns a computer, with a monitor, a keyboard and a mouse (of course) - Someone with a decent internet access - Someone who has either invested or going to invested 100's of hours to properly learn the iOS/Mac frameworks - Someone who is hoping to either make a living off his Mac development or threats this as in important hobby - Someone who will be able to af…
Yes, you're missing something. I run a small iOS contracting shop that does continuous integration. When the contracting market is good, we never have enough build servers, which can only be Macs. Virtualization only gets us so far. There IS NO aws / EC2 service for macs. I can't just spin up some instances to handle the load and spin down after the engineers go home. The options are literally run to the Apple store…
Understood, and a service that did this for a _lot_ of different platforms (hardware and software) would be considerably more compelling.
The absence of a "heterogenous" cloud (I know, this is a contradiction in terms) is part of why our business has to drag a server room around...