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Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

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Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#411

Post by api »

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…

Is there any reason you wouldn't just run a Mini in a closet? Is it magic just because it's in "the cloud?" A Mini on-prem is far more cost-effective.

The only reason this would make sense is if you needed to actually host something with >99.9% uptime or high bandwidth needs on a Mac.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#412

Post by lukeramsden »

andybak wrote: post #296
lukeramsden wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why am I paying for the other 21 hours? Unsure if you've seen the comments elsewhere in the thread but in case you haven't and this is a genuine question - because Apple's EULA forces Amazon to do this.

Yes - I did know that. I guess my question is directed more at Apple. Why stipulate this unless they want to hobble reasonable use-cases or inflate usage arbitrarily. Is the answer simply "Because they can and they like money?"

> Why stipulate this unless they want to hobble reasonable use-cases or inflate usage arbitrarily.

It seems this is Apple's sole motivation when it comes to anything developer related, which seems odd considering their goal is to commodotize software to sell their hardware - you'd think they wouldn't keep making it harder to make software for their platforms

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#413

Post by billiam »

skohan wrote: post #297
BillinghamJ wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No I'm sure AWS don't want it either. And it absolutely is 100% typical of Apple to do this kind of thing. They don't want third party companies to provide offerings which might cause them problems or degrade their brand/perception. I'm not at all saying these terms were added to benefit AWS. More that they were a condition of Apple doing this first official cloud partnership.

It's also 100% in line with Apple's recent trends of being hostile to developers. It's absolutely absurd to have to rent an server for 24 hours to do a single build. It's incredibly wasteful to have this much hardware sitting around and doing nothing.

Recent trends? Apple has been periodically screwing developers since always. Ultimately Apple just sees developers as a necessary evil to sell their products, but making life easy for them is not a priority.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#414

Post by melq »

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…

So no on-demand instances? I could see this being useful for CI/builds/testing but not if I have to buy 24 hours at a time.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#415

Post by comex »

wicket wrote: post #395
Lt_Riza_Hawkeye wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there doesn't seem to be any sort of XNU hacking community Probably because (from what I've heard), even using xnu is extremely painful, let alone hacking on it. And it's not like you can re-compile your changes to xnu back into a working MacOS machine

> And it's not like you can re-compile your changes to xnu back into a working MacOS machine Wow, that's just awful, but it would it explain it. Thanks!

That’s not true. You can run macOS with a custom-built kernel and it should work fine, although it won’t be exactly the same as the stock one (the released source is missing some bits).

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#416

Post by kgantchev »

sokoloff wrote: post #329
kgantchev wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Would I be correct saying that you're happy because in one stroke Apple has moved you from grey area to explicitly permitted, and part of your competition from grey area to explicitly forbidden? I don't know how any competition would be negatively impacted by Apple implementing these terms, unless the competition was already selling services that were on a short-term basis (below 24 hours). And to circle back aroun…

> I don't know how any competition would be negatively impacted by Apple implementing these terms, unless the competition was already selling services that were on a short-term basis (below 24 hours). Macstadium competes against other short-term rental companies but also against real Macs, Hackintoshes on physical machines, Hackintoshes on virtual machines (inc EC2), and non-consumption. Hacks on VMs are a pretty dir…

> Macstadium competes against other short-term rental companies but also against real Macs, Hackintoshes on physical machines, Hackintoshes on virtual machines (inc EC2), and non-consumption.

MacStadium isn't doing short-term rentals not because it can't but because the EULA doesn't allow it. Anybody doing short-term rentals is doing it on Mac hardware so they can just as easily sell long-term rentals. Aside from MacStadium being a major player in this field, I see absolutely nothing that favors them compared to their competition. In fact, it seems to have created Amazon as a competitor.

And the Hackintosh thing is the reason a Mac hosting companies exist in the first place. If Hackintoshes were allowed, there would be no companies offering Mac hosted hardware. I don't see how that's related to this particular situation tho. Apple created the need for Mac hosted hardware so blaming Mac hardware hosting companies for this is a bit backward.

> Hacks on VMs are a pretty direct competitor I’d think.

The VMs have to run on Mac hardware as well.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#417

Post by [deleted] »

Alex3917 wrote: post #311
kgantchev wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Would I be correct saying that you're happy because in one stroke Apple has moved you from grey area to explicitly permitted, and part of your competition from grey area to explicitly forbidden? I don't know how any competition would be negatively impacted by Apple implementing these terms, unless the competition was already selling services that were on a short-term basis (below 24 hours). And to circle back aroun…

Why wouldn't Apple just let people rent out computers for any amount of time, as long as they don't contain music or movies? I can understand why Apple would wan't someone to pay $3.99 to rent a movie for 48 hours, and then sub-rent that movie a couple dozen times. But why do they care about someone running CI?

[deleted]

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#418

Post by reaperducer »

NineStarPoint wrote: post #405
academia_hack wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm no expert, but I'm stunned that it costs more than $10,000 a year to connect a single computer to a corporate network such that AWS Macs become cost competitive. I've never worked in a big enterprise organization but I just can't wrap my head around the inefficiency required to make that math work.

I could see it being reasonable if a medium to large companies entire infrastructure was cloud based, and they only needed a handful of mac minis. Alternatively, a company who needed them only a handful of days a year for some reason I can’t immediately think of. Otherwise I agree. 24 hour minimum removes immediate scaling as an option, and for anyone who already has their own infrastructure the cost is prohibitively…

a company who needed them only a handful of days a year for some reason I can’t immediately think of

Perhaps it's good for render farms. Instead of building a giant render farm that sits idle between productions, you spin up a render farm only when you need one.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#419

Post by kgantchev »

oefrha wrote: post #248
kgantchev wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who else was offering Mac Mini rentals prior to this change? MacStadium appears to be the only major player in the space prior to Amazon jumping in.

Macminicolo has been around since at least 2005. They were acquired by MacStadium in 2016 though.

Macminicolo appears to have been Brian Stucki's company (as he said in his original post) and it was acquired by MacStadium: https://blog.macstadium.com/blog/macstadium-and-macminicolo

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#420

Post by reaperducer »

phire wrote: post #202
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…

With the pricing, 24h minimum and "only developers" restriction. it seems like there are exactly two usecases for this service. 1. You are a big company who needs Mac CI and your IT department has a strict "Cloud Only" restriction. 2. You are a developer for a cross-platform App who doesn't own a mac, but needs access to a real mac every few weeks or months for debugging/releasing.

it seems like there are exactly two usecases for this service.

People always do this on HN. "I can only think of two things, so those are the only two things that can possibly exist."

How about a render farm? If your company only produces three or four videos a year, why build a render farm that sits idle for half the year?

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