Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#31

Post by banana_giraffe » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 5:19 PM UTC

mcphage wrote: post #23

eminence32 wrote: post #21

I have an slightly-off-topic question: If I want to test that my opensource project builds and runs on MacOS, what's the cheapest way for me to do this? AWS seems like a fairly expensive way do this at $15 USD per day

You don't need to leave the machine running (and billing) 24/7/365—turning it on for a few hours a day when you're building for it, or testing builds, should be enough.

Unlike other EC2 instances, you have to "reserve" a host, and the MAC instances require a minimum of a 24 hour reservation, that you pay for regardless of the instance state.

It can be hard to justify $15.60 every time I want to test some random thing. Not to mention I seem to recall you can't actually cancel a reservation till the 24 hour window is up, so you need to remember to stop it the next day, or automate that action somehow.

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#32

Post by riknos314 » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 5:19 PM UTC

dougmwne wrote: post #20

It’s an interesting look at AWS pricing since the cost of the M1 Mac Mini ($699) and it’s power consumption (avg 26 watts) are known. Based on hardware costs (significant) and power costs (insignificant) you’re looking at a hardware ROI at about 6 months from the $.65 per hour price. AWS has an estimated 60% gross profit margin, so from there it’s probably possible to estimate some other interesting things about thei…

Maybe, there's still a lot of unknowns. The cost and power consumption of the nitro hardware to translate from the mac mini to everything else being the main one.

They're also likely pricing in some form of opportunity cost since the density of physical macs per unit rack space is almost certainly lower than the density of typical server hardware.

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#33

Post by Megatio » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 5:19 PM UTC

dougmwne wrote: post #20

It’s an interesting look at AWS pricing since the cost of the M1 Mac Mini ($699) and it’s power consumption (avg 26 watts) are known. Based on hardware costs (significant) and power costs (insignificant) you’re looking at a hardware ROI at about 6 months from the $.65 per hour price. AWS has an estimated 60% gross profit margin, so from there it’s probably possible to estimate some other interesting things about thei…

Its probably much more custom than other hardware.

I have never seen any business/professional mac hardware deployment which doesn't look custom build with some magic around it.

That alone might be much more expensive and needs a dedicated team.

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#34

Post by speedgoose » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 5:19 PM UTC

xeromal wrote: post #22

speedgoose wrote: post #8

Many months later and more than 5 times more expensive than Scaleway though. https://www.scaleway.com/en/hello-m1/

But I can do everything I need in one system with AWS.

Yes, many people find value in being locked down with a single cloud provider. It can make sense, but sometimes you don't need the AWS ecosystem and just need an online server.

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#35

Post by nostrebored » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 5:20 PM UTC

speedgoose wrote: post #8

Many months later and more than 5 times more expensive than Scaleway though. https://www.scaleway.com/en/hello-m1/

And then as an enterprise I have to build in my IAM, auditing, artifact generation, etc. into the solution. I will pay the 5x.

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#36

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 5:20 PM UTC

mcphage wrote: post #23

eminence32 wrote: post #21

I have an slightly-off-topic question: If I want to test that my opensource project builds and runs on MacOS, what's the cheapest way for me to do this? AWS seems like a fairly expensive way do this at $15 USD per day

You don't need to leave the machine running (and billing) 24/7/365—turning it on for a few hours a day when you're building for it, or testing builds, should be enough.

[deleted]

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#37

Post by zamadatix » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 5:23 PM UTC

neilalexander wrote: post #16

nicoburns wrote: post #2

The 24 hour minimum pricing model for these really sucks. My understanding is that this is a condition of Apple's license to Amazon to run macOS on these machines, and I can't work out why they'd do it.

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.

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.

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#38

Post by gotstad » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 5:23 PM UTC

cehrlich wrote: post #26

Genuinely curious, who is the audience for this? Large iOS dev shops who want hardware to run builds on and don't mind that you need to reserve them for at least 24 hours at a time?

Well it's anecdotal, but yes, our company fits directly into that space. You might ask why we don't want to just have the hardware in-house, but since we're developing Software as Medical Device products for iOS, we'd rather qualify Amazon as a critical supplier than try to operate the activity ourselves (with all the controls that come with doing so).

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#39

Post by speedgoose » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 5:23 PM UTC

nostrebored wrote: post #35

speedgoose wrote: post #8

Many months later and more than 5 times more expensive than Scaleway though. https://www.scaleway.com/en/hello-m1/

And then as an enterprise I have to build in my IAM, auditing, artifact generation, etc. into the solution. I will pay the 5x.

In your case you should probably pay the 5.7x yes (and probably more when you consider bandwidth).

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#40

Post by mciancia » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 5:24 PM UTC

emodendroket wrote: post #5

Yeah, this is huge, especially for hobbyists. The M1 is a great laptop but being freed from buying one just to build for iOS is still cool.

Meh, I don't think that too many things that AWS is releasing are at all relevant for hobbyist because of pricing. I

n this case, you need to pay at least 16 usd for running this because of 24h limitation, so for example using scaleway (2.4EUR for 24h) or just buying a mac mini probably is gonna be cheaper overall