Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#181

Post by my123 » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 10:31 PM UTC

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #113

meatmanek wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

See Xcode Cloud for example: running on qemu (w/ a linux host) on Ice Lake server Xeons.

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#182

Post by PowerfulWizard » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 10:33 PM UTC

jedberg wrote: post #150

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #138

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.

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.

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.

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#183

Post by ericd » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 10:34 PM UTC

jedberg wrote: post #150

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #138

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.

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.

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.

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#184

Post by danielheath » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 10:37 PM UTC

nix23 wrote: post #177

bstar77 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mov…

Just try Oracle Cloud believe me...it's so much better.

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.

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#185

Post by etxm » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 10:37 PM UTC

tedivm wrote: post #163

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #138

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.

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).

Wait until they see how awful IaC is.

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#186

Post by danielheath » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 10:39 PM UTC

PowerfulWizard wrote: post #182

jedberg wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#187

Post by rmason » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 11:01 PM UTC

bstar77 wrote: post #158

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #138

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.

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 mov…

I'm using Google Fi. Once I exceed my paid for bandwidth level for a given month it notifies me. When I go 50% over it notifies me a second time. If I want to know the bandwidth used I can check it anytime I want on my phone.

Considering the huge amount of developers having problems of this kind how hard would it be for AWS to implement a similar system?

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#188

Post by Andrew_nenakhov » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 11:05 PM UTC

rmason wrote: post #187

bstar77 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mov…

I'm using Google Fi. Once I exceed my paid for bandwidth level for a given month it notifies me. When I go 50% over it notifies me a second time. If I want to know the bandwidth used I can check it anytime I want on my phone. Considering the huge amount of developers having problems of this kind how hard would it be for AWS to implement a similar system?

How hard? Bees against honey hard.

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#189

Post by imwillofficial » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 11:12 PM UTC

avidphantasm wrote: post #171

hdjjhhvvhga wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 themsel…

Yes, the “let’s hook up your credit card to the Internet” part of cloud computing still makes me nervous.

Use a prepaid credit card. Boom. Protected

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#190

Post by heavyset_go » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 11:13 PM UTC

rmason wrote: post #187

bstar77 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mov…

I'm using Google Fi. Once I exceed my paid for bandwidth level for a given month it notifies me. When I go 50% over it notifies me a second time. If I want to know the bandwidth used I can check it anytime I want on my phone. Considering the huge amount of developers having problems of this kind how hard would it be for AWS to implement a similar system?

Other providers let users put billing limits on their accounts. Seems like Amazon benefits when users aren't able to put a $30 a month limit on their accounts like the OP wanted to.