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Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

aws.amazon.com

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Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#221

Post by notreallyserio »

jedberg wrote: post #210
PowerfulWizard wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One issue is what gets shut down when you hit the max? If you have an EC2 instance running and you hit the max, do they shut it off? Would customers understand that and be ok with it? What if you have an S3 bucket? Should they just delete the data? That's probably not what you want. You can basically do max bill now -- you can set up a cloud watch alarm for billing and when it reaches a certain price, run a script. Y…

Yeah, shut off EC2 instances, block access to all resources, etc. Preserve bucket data and other storage for N days or $M max allowance (ultimately billable) before deleting. AWS could limit how much storage they make available to someone with a budget, reducing their risk substantially.

It's pretty easy stuff, IMO, but the upside for them is low -- after all they are already #1.

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#222

Post by howdydoo »

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 would it be for AWS to implement a similar system?

I don't want to be that guy who yells out from my armchair to say something is easy. But........ quota management at its core is incrementing a number, then reading the number back. AWS is already doing things plenty more complicated than that. I'm sure they could build this if they cared to.

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#223

Post by easton »

tialaramex wrote: post #214
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 not a Microsoft fan (he writes from his Linux desktop) but I was astonished that Azure actually has working "This is how much we can spend, and literally no more" behaviour coming from previously working with AWS where that's either entirely unavailable or black magic known only to experts. Why does it have that? Because Azure gives away $150/ month Azure credits to students with Visual Studio. If Azure "mistaken…

Oddly, there's certain things in Azure that don't work with the credits feature, like spot instances. I'm not sure why, but it's awesome for not blowing up my bank account because I did something wrong.

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#224

Post by [deleted] »

moondev wrote: post #218
zamadatix wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are Apple's terms that Amazon is following, not the other way around. You are getting bare metal that you have to reserve for a minimum of 24 hours because that's how Apple allows it to be licensed not because that's what Amazon thought would make the most sense.

I run VMware esxi on my Mac mini with 64G of memory to create plenty of macos and Linux vms. Are you saying this is against the TOS?

[deleted]

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#225

Post by bstar77 »

kondro wrote: post #213
bstar77 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's possible that was the issue, but I estimated a 20gb storage partition. Maybe usage was to blame, I know the server was inefficient with reads and writes.

But what did you actually assign? EBS volumes are priced based on provisioned capacity (including throughput if you choose io2 volumes).

I just don't remember the details. As I said earlier, it's likely I made a mistake, but the process was not clear and I was not notified when my instance expense ballooned to something I clearly wasn't expecting. I never had these kinds of issues with Heroku, Linode or any other host.

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#226

Post by dheera »

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.

Especially if I google "ec2 pricing" I don't land on a page with $ signs on it. That's really freaking annoying.

Even if I hit the "General Purpose" link on the page I land on, I STILL don't land on a page with $ signs on it.

Seriously, I don't even know where they list the damn pricing anymore.

It used to be listed out plain and simple on the first page you landed on with a region selector.

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#227

Post by notreallyserio »

imwillofficial wrote: post #189
avidphantasm wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You'll still owe the money, but it's unknown whether or not they'll come after you or report you to credit agencies (which they can do w/o SSN). I guess you could use a fake name and address, though.

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#228

Post by chris37879 »

st3fan wrote: post #193
heavyset_go wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You are just making stuff up. AWS has all those things. Billing limits. Cost monitoring. It is all there.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cost-management/latest/userguide...

You have to configure (correctly) an AWS IAM account with permissions to run actions you have to specify when budget amounts are hit. There's no simple 'Do not spend more than $X per month' setting. You have to understand AWS's auth and roles to set a limit using an action.

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#229

Post by chris37879 »

nojito wrote: post #152
JCM9 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is really not looking at the math in the right way for those that are the target market. If you just want an M1 instance just because sure just go buy one and keep in plugged in all the time in your basement. That’s not the target market. Imagine you’re developing an app in regulated market and need to have Macs for CI/CD There’s a lot more to this than just keeping some Mac mini’s under your desk. How are you m…

Apple already offers this for Devs. https://developer.apple.com/xcode-cloud/

As of like 2 months ago, sure. And even then it's still in beta now. We've been using Macs this way since long before Apple decided to grace us with their nonsense implementation.

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#230

Post by PowerfulWizard »

jedberg wrote: post #210
PowerfulWizard wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One issue is what gets shut down when you hit the max? If you have an EC2 instance running and you hit the max, do they shut it off? Would customers understand that and be ok with it? What if you have an S3 bucket? Should they just delete the data? That's probably not what you want. You can basically do max bill now -- you can set up a cloud watch alarm for billing and when it reaches a certain price, run a script. Y…

There must be a process for unpaid bills, whatever that process is they could just enact it at the user's threshold instead of their own threshold. Ideally a soft limit that would disable networking and resource creation and then later a hard limit where your account is wiped out.

Because of the potential overhang before the billing system catches up I think it would be appropriate to lower the service quotas on this type of account. I'm not sure if the customer can lower their own quotas which would be an alternate cost control strategy but a beginner wouldn't know to think of that anyway. The solution with billing alerts is good at a company level but too much for a beginner in my opinion.

I know unexpected costs were a concern for me when I started using AWS as a student in 2008 and it is still a concern for people in the same situation, just with so much more complexity on top of it all. It will be a tiny fragment of their revenue but as time goes on a higher and higher level of expertise is required to get started, even though you can accomplish a lot with just the free tier. The amount of progress they've made on this issue in the last 13 years is just not impressive.

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