Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

Post by alborzb » Fri, Dec 03, 2021, 7:09 AM UTC

pwojnaro wrote: post #147

neilalexander wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They aren't just firing up a virtual machine on over-provisioned hardware, they're dedicating an entire bare metal machine to you. It is in their interests to make that worthwhile commercially.

It's entirely possible that the 24hr minimum is driven by the operational overhead, not just the licensing terms. Since this is bare metal, re-provisioning between customer sessions might require some level of human interaction, and this needs to be baked into the cost model of such a service.

Post by notinty » Fri, Dec 03, 2021, 8:13 AM UTC

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?

Post by ericd » Fri, Dec 03, 2021, 11:54 AM UTC

jedberg wrote: post #211

ericd wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The complexity is to meet customer needs, not the prices themselves. But aren't you glad they have bandwidth tiers so the more you use the cheaper it gets? :)

Post by hdjjhhvvhga » Fri, Dec 03, 2021, 5:26 PM UTC

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

Post by pwojnaro » Fri, Dec 03, 2021, 7:41 PM UTC

alborzb wrote: post #251

pwojnaro wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's entirely possible that the 24hr minimum is driven by the operational overhead, not just the licensing terms. Since this is bare metal, re-provisioning between customer sessions might require some level of human interaction, and this needs to be baked into the cost model of such a service.

Amazon openly admits it is because of licensing terms. From https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/mac/#Pricing : "Billing for EC2 Mac instances is per second with a 24-hour minimum allocation period to comply with the Apple macOS Software License Agreement"