how does this affect companies like buddybuild that offer CI/CD for ios? has it commoditized them, or does it give them a lower cost way to run their cluster?
For CI/CD providers, it depends on how they offer the underlying macOS environment. If they target enterprise workloads that have stringent compliance needs, then this offering is a net benefit especially if the enterprise is already on AWS. The cost isn't cheap but there are many ways to price it as a value added provider.
Amazon 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…
With the pricing, 24h minimum and "only developers" restriction. it seems like there are exactly two usecases for this service.
1. You are a big company who needs Mac CI and your IT department has a strict "Cloud Only" restriction.
2. You are a developer for a cross-platform App who doesn't own a mac, but needs access to a real mac every few weeks or months for debugging/releasing.
It's going to be out of their hands on this one. Apple have pretty strong EULAs. Microsoft's licensing for clouds is also a pain in the arse. You (the cloud platform) have to pay for a full months license the moment an instance is created. The way it's structured you have some wriggle room, e.g. you have your placement algorithm land new instances on where Windows instances have already been in a given month, so you…
> Microsoft's licensing for clouds is also a pain in the arse. You (the cloud platform) have to pay for a full months license the moment an instance is created. This is exactly how I would expect the licensing to work.
Can't you also bring your own licenses for AWS/Windows? This all makes sense to me too... if you want to run a Windows instance, you need a license for Windows (on top of the hardware fee). Microsoft says that AWS can loan you a license (if you need one), but AWS would still need to hold a full license.
Maybe those companies should focus their business in countries where EULAs have zero legal value, like EU countries.
Though some of their statements probably don't apply, I think EULAs apply in EU. Software license do apply. Software patents are still not recognized, let's hope this continues for a long time.
EULA apply, but there is legislations in EU that make terms prohibiting you from reverse engineer, sell, rent or automating null and void.
Yup, the bandwidth at the big clouds is far too expensive. It makes more sense to host somewhere else if you're a consumer company.
Funnily bandwidth pricing at Oracle Cloud is the cheapest of all major clouds. Its kind of ironic as every product oracle sells costs your „first born son“.
An interesting offering from Amazon that is crippled by Apple and MacStadium, who deserve to be raked over the coals for their recent EULA changes. Just read the post on MacStadium's blog: https://blog.macstadium.com/blog/developers-big-sur-and-vind... Under the new agreement, you must: * Rent to only one organization * Rent for 24 hours at the minimum * Use it for some set of "approved" development work …among other…
AWS are offering the first ever officially supported macOS virtualisation, I would call that a milestone. Given the costs, you would only use these instances for "approved" development work only. It is aimed at larger companies where maintaining a MacBook Mini build server is relatively expensive. Such companies will be using more than one instance of a MacBook mini to have a level of redundancy in case of a failure. If they are used in earnest, such instances would have to be replaced at least every year with old instance disposed off professionally (scrambling hard drive contents, etc). Yes the instances are expensive, but there is a definitely an use case for these.
I disagree. I'm pretty sure that MacStadium didn't limit their rental to one customer per hardware box out of spite for their customers, but because that's what Apple expected of them. So their were being held to a higher standard than some of their competitors, who had much higher profit margins by putting multiple customers on one machine. So I think he is justifiably happy that Apple created a fair competition by…
I have no problem with MacStadium's business model; in fact, I have seriously considered renting Macs from them in the past specifically because of their service of providing a dedicated machine for an extended period of time. In that case we were looking at running extended builds and the cost of downloading Xcode, then our source tree, then running a build for hours on a per-hour service was fairly competitive with…
> What Apple did here is create a monopoly for MacStadium
Why can't any business rent out physical Macs on a 1:1 basis on the same terms as MacStadium? It looks like they can, and if so then it's nothing favorable to MacStadium specifically: it's just not favorable to fractional renting like AWS.