Amazon EC2 Mac Instances • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#221

Post by jdub » Tue, Dec 01, 2020, 9:21 AM UTC

oxfordmale wrote: post #209

saagarjha wrote: post #172

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.…

It's not virtualisation.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#222

Post by toyg » Tue, Dec 01, 2020, 9:27 AM UTC

mosselman wrote: post #215

punnerud wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EULA apply, but there is legislations in EU that make terms prohibiting you from reverse engineer, sell, rent or automating null and void.

Do you have a source for this?

European Computer Program Directive. Art.6 for the reverse engineering bit, but the rest is there too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Programs_Directive

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#223

Post by noduerme » Tue, Dec 01, 2020, 9:28 AM UTC

shp0ngle wrote: post #87

tootie wrote: post #50

"The instances are launched as EC2 Dedicated Hosts with a minimum tenancy of 24 hours" These are just rentable Mac Minis, not VMs. This will have only one use case and that's for build servers. Unless anyone has scalable AppleScript jobs to run?

The 24 hours is dictated by new Big Sur EULA. https://9to5mac.com/2020/11/11/macos-big-sur-adds-leasing-te... From the new EULA (not just for Amazon, paraphrased by 9to5mac): * Apple software and hardware must be leased “in its entirety to and individual or organization” * A lease period must be “for a minimum period of twenty-four (24) consecutive hours” * Customers must now accept software agreements for all instal…

Wow. That is insane and stupid and incredibly fucked up. I've had to rent Macs in the cloud on a rare basis to test certain latest-version Safari issues, and it's always a crap connection and a miserable experience. But is it enforceable for them to stipulate the minimum length of time of a VM lease?! That's your machine. You paid for it. If you want to rent it out to someone for 3 hours that's your prerogative. I don't see how they can possibly enforce that or how it could be legal as a seller to tell someone how to use their hardware.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#224

Post by noduerme » Tue, Dec 01, 2020, 9:31 AM UTC

zelly wrote: post #162

dheera wrote: post #76

Earlier 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 will get your Apple Developer account terminated if they ever find out. Live by the walled garden die by the walled garden

Screw the walled garden. Build web apps.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#225

Post by amq » Tue, Dec 01, 2020, 9:31 AM UTC

dfabulich wrote: post #149

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…

Not directly relevant, but also for comparison: GitHub Actions with a Mac runner are $0.08 per minute, $4.8 per hour and $42,048 per year.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#226

Post by em500 » Tue, Dec 01, 2020, 9:31 AM UTC

saagarjha wrote: post #172

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…

Not a lawyer, I do wonder if such terms would hold up in court. I can see the case for EULA around virtualization when you're running multiple instances of macOS. But say I just buy a bunch of Mini's and rent (full access to) them out (bare metal, full system) per hour, rather than 24hr. Or for non-"development" work, whatever that means. Could Apple really put up a good case in court?

It seems unlikely that they could successfully sue me if I buy a bunch of Macs and give some people physical time-limited access (say, students in a classroom). What makes the difference? Remote access? Charging rent? I'm not sufficiently invested in these matters for a deep dive, so hoping someone with legal knowledge could chime in.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#227

Post by freemint » Tue, Dec 01, 2020, 9:31 AM UTC

chx wrote: post #188

rualca wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of cloud providers don't charge for bandwidth until you hit an anti-abuse ceiling. For example, Hetzner offers a 20TB bandwidth cap per node. You don't need to buy AWS to get same prices on network.

Hetzner dedicated servers (which start below 30 EUR mind you) do not have bandwidth caps for two years now. https://www.hetzner.com/news/traffic-limit/

The person above is clearly talking about Hetzner cloud which a 20TB cap per instance. A no frills, SSD or network storage backed VPS which has price/perfomance than other offers i have seen which offer fine grained billing.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#228

Post by GordonS » Tue, Dec 01, 2020, 9:33 AM UTC

tootie wrote: post #50

"The instances are launched as EC2 Dedicated Hosts with a minimum tenancy of 24 hours" These are just rentable Mac Minis, not VMs. This will have only one use case and that's for build servers. Unless anyone has scalable AppleScript jobs to run?

As an alternative, Azure DevOps has hosted MacOS build servers - and build minutes included in the free tier can be used with them.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#229

Post by capableweb » Tue, Dec 01, 2020, 9:50 AM UTC

saagarjha wrote: post #186

QuinnyPig wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really fail to see what Brian Stucki did wrong? He’s subject to the whims of Apple licensing way more than AWS is.

The license changes basically allow nobody other than MacStadium to exist–throughout the blog post he gloats about how their business model is a hand in the new EULA's glove. And, of course, MacStadium been in contact with Apple to work this out, as he mention at the end. What has clearly happened is Apple asked them what the EULA should look like, or suggested a EULA based on what MacStadium is doing, and they went…

> What has clearly happened is Apple asked them what the EULA should look like

It's clear that you have never worked with Apple. This is not how Apple does business. Apple sets the terms and you either agree or GTFO.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#230

Post by sudhirj » Tue, Dec 01, 2020, 9:56 AM UTC

kbumsik wrote: post #217

oxfordmale wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> AWS are offering the first ever officially supported macOS virtualisation AWS is offering dedicated bare metal Mac Minis for rent with virtual NICs and virtual storage powered by AWS Nitro, there is no macOS virtualisation.

Technically no, but the word has come to mean something different. Because even bare metal instances come under the same APIs, security, architecture and usage model as the other "real" VMs, the difference is very slim now. We can think of them as VMs of a specific size with a minimum billing time and get on with using them with our existing tooling.