Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s about $1 per hour.
Please tell me this is a typo, and you actually meant $1/day.
Afraid not, but you can get much better pricing at MacStadium.
Amazon EC2 Mac Instances
151–160 of 511 posts
Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances
#152How can this be viable cost wise. With their minimum billing of $1.083 an hour, and a minimum of 24 hour billing, unless you want this for a short time only, these costs are way too high. macstasium.com has much lower costs for this.
Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can also run a MacOS VM in VirtualBox on Ubuntu. No Apple hardware needed. https://github.com/myspaghetti/macos-virtualbox
You “can”, in a technical sense, but not legally—Apple’s licensing for macOS only allows it to be run on Apple hardware. (You can run a macOS domU on another OS’s hypervisor, but that hypervisor has to be running on a Mac.) This matters when you’re a corporation.
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Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances
#154Amazon lists the price of mac1 instances (running on rack-mounted Intel Mac Minis) at $1.083 per hour, $9,487 per year. You have to pay for 24 hours up front, after which they bill by the second. https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/dedicated-hosts/pricing/ They don't yet display any reservation pricing for mac1 instances, but they do offer a "savings plan." https://aws.amazon.com/savingsplans/pricing/ If you pay for three yea…
Don’t forget the bandwidth premium you pay at Amazon AWS.
Paying these premiums is all in the furtherance of a good cause called “Bezos getting another hundy billion to his name”.
Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because they'd much rather use their own high-density server designs instead of dealing with Macs that really aren't made for datacenters, and M1 has no clear must-have benefit over those justifying that effort outside of the macOS use case. Now if Apple were to selling/license M1 chips to them, that might be different, but there is no indication that's going to happen in any way, and then the current work based on M…
I disagree. I think it’s obvious that if they went into it big, they wouldn’t just buy retail Macs. The current work would be testing the market and the experience of providing MacOS as a server. If there’s demand for server M1 chips, why wouldn’t Apple sell them? It’s a completely different market from their laptop consumer business. Bottom line: if the market demands M1 on servers, there’s billions to be made suppl…
Apple clearly isn't interested in others offering macOS servers on non-Apple hardware, their licensing practices make that clear. If not to run macOS, AWS customers have no reason to demand M1 cores, and AWS has little reason to want to buy M1 chips over their own designs. And Apple and AWS are not the kind of companies to go in a deep partnership with shared designs etc over something like this.
Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances
#156Interesting. I guess it's not the first but does the MacOS EULA really allow for this? Or does AWS have a special license? Which would beg the question as for the need of real hardware. (Sure you can break a EULA but at some point it would violate ToS and Apple could easily block updates). > The instances are launched as EC2 Dedicated Hosts with a minimum tenancy of 24 hours. This almost sounds like they are using fi…
There’s a good blog post from Macstadium explaining the recent EULA changes. 24 hours is mentioned there. https://blog.macstadium.com/blog/developers-big-sur-and-vind...
And now we know the real reason for those changes.
Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances
#157Amazon lists the price of mac1 instances (running on rack-mounted Intel Mac Minis) at $1.083 per hour, $9,487 per year. You have to pay for 24 hours up front, after which they bill by the second. https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/dedicated-hosts/pricing/ They don't yet display any reservation pricing for mac1 instances, but they do offer a "savings plan." https://aws.amazon.com/savingsplans/pricing/ If you pay for three yea…
Yeah the pricing means macstadium is the better choice for this unless you’re all in on AWS and have no choice.
Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances
#158This seems 100% about building in XCode, which leaves me wondering why it's being offered as an EC2 instance instead of some higher order build tool. Is there a use case I'm missing?
Software compatibility testing is a big one, particularly if/when it's easy to spin up Mac instances with various OS versions installed.
Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances
#159This seems a bit half-baked and niche at the moment. You have to rent a whole machine for 24 hours, which is expensive and prevents on-demand scaling. I wonder if Apple and Amazon are just dipping their toes in to prepare for a deeper collaboration in future.
Given the pricing of these instances ($24/day with a 1 day minimum), nobody's going to be deploying their autoscaled k8s clusters on these anytime soon.
Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances
#160This seems a bit half-baked and niche at the moment. You have to rent a whole machine for 24 hours, which is expensive and prevents on-demand scaling. I wonder if Apple and Amazon are just dipping their toes in to prepare for a deeper collaboration in future.
I'd take the fact that the 24h restriction from Apple's licensing hasn't been removed as a sign that there isn't much collaboration going on. Apple granting an exception from that would seem like a no-brainer if they wanted to support a partner offering this.