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Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

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Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#431

Post by dfabulich »

inopinatus wrote: post #214
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…

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…

> Since my duty cycle for a Mac Mini is rather less than 20%, the economics even of on-demand instances immediately make sense

MacStadium's prices are "rather less than 20%" of AWS's prices. To make sense, AWS would have to be comparable to MacStadium's pricing.

And don't forget the 24-hour minimum. If your duty cycle for a Mac Mini is only 20% per day every weekday, well, you can't rent a Mac Mini for less than a 24 hour period, so instead of paying for 20% of a month, you'll be paying for 20 work days, 60% of a month. On AWS, that would run you $546/month, 4x as much as you'd pay MacStadium for the entire month.

AWS's price is only comparable to MacStadium if you need five 24-hour periods per month (or less).

And, sure, AWS's prices will decline at some point, but I'm not expecting an 80% price drop this year.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#432

Post by api »

danenania wrote: post #429
api wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just run ZeroTier on the Mini and join it to your network. That's what we do. Of course we are ZeroTier so this is how we roll. Anything with an Internet connection is in "the cloud." We just donate all its spare cycles to Boinc. :)

Pay by the second would perhaps be preferable but unless I am reading this wrong you have to pay by the hour and it's relatively expensive.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#433

Post by wicket »

comex wrote: post #415
wicket wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

Okay, so it should be possible then. That brings me back to me original question of why isn't there a XNU hacking community?

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#434

Post by westacular »

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…

> The big problem with CI/CD on Mac is that Xcode does not allow you to run builds in parallel, so you need one Mac per build unless you use virtualisation.

Yes it does. The Xcode GUI only allows one build at a time, but you can run multiple `xcodebuild` command line builds using the same or different versions of Xcode in parallel, even under the same macOS user.

For running tests, there used to be problems if you were trying to invoke the iOS Simulator for different versions of Xcode in parallel, but those issues were fixed 4 or 5 years ago.

I've setup and used a set of bare-metal Mac mini CI runner, each configured to run two jobs in parallel, and the Xcode pieces of that are rock solid and didn't need _any_ workarounds to enable parallel jobs.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#435

Post by nitrogen »

reaperducer wrote: post #418
NineStarPoint wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Aren't most renderers compatible with Linux or Windows, where you can get much larger instances?

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#436

Post by treesknees »

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?

>People always do this on HN

You mean have opinions and open discussion? "I can only think of two things" doesn't mean "there are only two things exactly and everyone else is wrong". Welcome to the Internet, I see you are new here.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#437

Post by danenania »

api wrote: post #432
danenania wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just run ZeroTier on the Mini and join it to your network. That's what we do. Of course we are ZeroTier so this is how we roll. Anything with an Internet connection is in "the cloud." We just donate all its spare cycles to Boinc. :) Pay by the second would perhaps be preferable but unless I am reading this wrong you have to pay by the hour and it's relatively expensive.

It's too early in the morning for me to try to parse an AWS pricing page, but according to another comment: "You have to pay for 24 hours up front, after which they bill by the second."

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#438

Post by mritun »

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 work in a large company.

The problem is not the first time setup. The problem is essentially what “uptime” you can provide. Once you setup an infrastructure many people come to depend on it.

Lets say two teams lose half a day when that CI/CD mac mini goes down then paying for a cloud provider to manage many instances and “sharing them ondemand” makes a lot of monetary sense.

Of course, paying a cloud provider may or may not make sense for hobbyists. Personally, I pay for cloud storage - thats super hard to get right.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#439

Post by ampdepolymerase »

throwawayffffas wrote: post #275
ampdepolymerase wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Microsoft have to follow its own EULA? Will it be an antitrust violation if they don't?

No, Microsoft owns it's software it does not need a license to use it.

But is using legal mechanisms to reduce a competitor's advantage (where the competitor licenses your product) considered to be antitrust? In the internet explorer case one of the major disputes was whether Microsoft manipulated its API to favour explorer versus other software.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#440

Post by dylan604 »

lukeramsden wrote: post #290
andybak wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

I'm honestly kind of surprised that this isn't a service that Apple offers directly. Keep it part of their walled garden. Only apps compiled on the ACC (Apple Cloud Compiler) will receive certificate signing which allows them to be offered in the AppStore. And by a service Apple offers, I of course mean a service Apple requires.
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