Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

Post by jedberg » Fri, Dec 03, 2021, 1:46 AM UTC

PowerfulWizard wrote: post #230

jedberg wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Post by jedberg » Fri, Dec 03, 2021, 1:47 AM UTC

notreallyserio wrote: post #221

jedberg wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by R0b0t1 » Fri, Dec 03, 2021, 2:21 AM UTC

Spivak wrote: post #231

R0b0t1 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think they're enforceable in the US either. Once you have it you have it. This is what a sale legally is, it terminates the rights of the former owner. They can refuse to sell to you if they think you'll do something with it, but if you get it from them by lying or from a second hand sale they can't do anything. For software you can also have person A buy something, then give it to person B who didn't click a…

You run around this by designing your hardware to only work with your provided software and require the user accept the T&C. If they find out your violating it they can terminate your license and, effectively, make your chips bricks. You are legally allowed to reverse engineer them and provide your own software but Nvidia pretty much buys whole departments at universities to have the bleeding edge of hardware obfusca…

Post by EricE » Fri, Dec 03, 2021, 2:37 AM UTC

jedberg wrote: post #234

notreallyserio wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That might work for you, but not everyone. They might even have legal trouble with such a system, if they delete data that was required to be retained for example. You're not thinking of all the edge cases.

Post by EricE » Fri, Dec 03, 2021, 2:39 AM UTC

DrBazza wrote: post #50

SavantIdiot wrote: post #3

Naive question: are these literally closets full of Macs? Or giant m1 MP servers?

I came here to ask the same thing. So if Apple don't make a rackable M1 server, what do they themselves use? It seems a bit unlikely Apple would have racks of minis as well.