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Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

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Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#421

Post by ballenf »

andybak wrote: post #273
phire wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My use case is that I need to build for a recent iOS device but I don't want to upgrade my Macbook to an os version that doesn't support 32bit apps. But the 24hr thing kills it for me. I will never get 24 hours use out of it. Maybe a few hours. Why am I paying for the other 21 hours? Maybe someone can wrap this SaaS in a other Saas and sell timeshares in a virtual Mac.

Could you virtualize a newer MacOS version on your Mac hardware?

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#422

Post by minhazm »

academia_hack wrote: post #387
inopinatus wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those numbers actually make the AWS instances a shoo-in for my current development purposes. The cost of housing and managing a unit of hardware is nonzero. Actuals vary wildly by location, purposes, and sector; but if everyone can get their heads out of the hobbyist-tinkerer mindset for a moment and consider that lifetime TCO is a real and meaningful consideration for businesses, then the component that isn't buying…

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.

It would be cheaper if you had your own data center already or an office space sufficiently large to store these Mac Mini's. But if you have neither and are operating out of say AWS, then it becomes more expensive to rent space to put these Mac Mini's into, especially if you don't need it all the time. In that way it can actually be "cheaper", because it's compared to the cost of building out the infrastructure required to support your own hardware.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#423

Post by woah »

academia_hack wrote: post #387
inopinatus wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those numbers actually make the AWS instances a shoo-in for my current development purposes. The cost of housing and managing a unit of hardware is nonzero. Actuals vary wildly by location, purposes, and sector; but if everyone can get their heads out of the hobbyist-tinkerer mindset for a moment and consider that lifetime TCO is a real and meaningful consideration for businesses, then the component that isn't buying…

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 don’t understand how you are confused. If I need to check if my app works on m1, I can now spend $24 to do that instead of $650 or whatever it retails for.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#424

Post by kgantchev »

coldtea wrote: post #354
Alex3917 wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Because tens of thousands of devs working on other platforms would be able to rent a Mac for half an hour, build their cross-platform framework code as an XCode project, and then submit to the App Store, without ever touching a Mac, testing on a Mac, and so on. At least this puts a barrier to entry.

This one!

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#425

Post by reaperducer »

wicket wrote: post #390
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…

> For comparison, you can rent an equivalent Mac Mini from MacStadium for $139/month, $1,668/year. Or you can rent their cheapest model for $59/month, $708/year. > You can also buy the equivalent Mac Mini for $1,899. Not only that, but MacStadium lets you run multiple VMs on a single Mac at no extra cost. Amazon's offering is seriously underwhelming. The more I use or learn about MacStadium, the less impressed I am w…

Not only that, but MacStadium lets you run multiple VMs on a single Mac at no extra cost. Amazon's offering is seriously underwhelming

To the hobbiest market, yes. But large companies, at which this seem to be aimed, work with names they know, not names they don't.

The company I work for would pay more to use Amazon than MacStadium for equivalent products. That's just how corporate bureaucracy works. It shouldn't, but it almost always does.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#426

Post by sokoloff »

kgantchev wrote: post #416
sokoloff wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Mac…

Condition: Person X has a need to run macOS for 3 hours for whatever reason. They have a lot of options, including the ones I listed.

Various options have different drawbacks, including EULA violations, but all represent viable alternatives for some (therefore competition) to Macstadium.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#427

Post by bochoh »

The thing I still don't understand with Mac, even if you were to virtualize it, is that VNC is abysmal compared to RDP from Microsoft. How are people actually /using/ this hardware (short of command line x-code builds)?

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#428

Post by AshamedCaptain »

reaperducer wrote: post #420
phire wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Because at some point it may literally be cheaper? Not that I made the math, but since the point here is about "opening the possibilities", then it is also possible that having a render farm sitting idle half a year is actually the more sensible option.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#429

Post by danenania »

api wrote: post #411
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.

If you need it for CI/CD of some kind, then APIs, networking, access control, and security (including, possibly, physical security) are all important too, and not trivial to do with a machine in your closet.

Paying by the second is also ideal for these use cases. You run a build occasionally, but it mostly sits idle.

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