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Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

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Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#451

Post by paulfurtado »

I wonder if these can easily run linux AMIs. Since OSX doesn't have native containerization, our CI system for mac builds runs linux on mac minis and runs osx VMs inside of linux since you're allowed to run osx vms on linux if linux is running on mac hardware. So in an ideal world, we'd run our own linux AMI on the baremetal mac instances and run OSX in VMs.

I'm sure it's possible of course, but I wonder how painful it would be to setup. Fighting EFI/secureboot? Some other bootloader?

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#452

Post by 0x44 »

cjaybo wrote: post #448
woah wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So these are for people who want to do quick compatibility testing? For that use case, how does it not make more sense to go with MacStadium? If you end up needing to test for two days instead of one, you're already in the pricing territory where you could have gotten a full month of usage from MacStadium.

> how does it not make more sense to go with MacStadium?

If you're already in AWS, your deployment infrastructure and tooling is already configured and tuned for AWS. Deploying a Mac EC2 instance is just adding another target. Whereas deploying to another provider is an unknown amount of work to integrate with their API (if they even have one). The wall-time cost of people's time and effort vastly outweighs the marginal savings you'd get by going with a low-cost provider.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#453

Post by Technically »

0x44 wrote: post #452
cjaybo wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So these are for people who want to do quick compatibility testing? For that use case, how does it not make more sense to go with MacStadium? If you end up needing to test for two days instead of one, you're already in the pricing territory where you could have gotten a full month of usage from MacStadium.

> how does it not make more sense to go with MacStadium? If you're already in AWS, your deployment infrastructure and tooling is already configured and tuned for AWS. Deploying a Mac EC2 instance is just adding another target. Whereas deploying to another provider is an unknown amount of work to integrate with their API (if they even have one). The wall-time cost of people's time and effort vastly outweighs the margi…

Presumably if you're making a mac app (or ios app), you're not targeting EC2 at all. Even if you have a server component to your mac app, the deployment infrastructure is completely unrelated to the client pipeline—it's tough to see how you could integrate any AWS benefits into this pipeline. If you're just writing a server, there's no need to deploy to a mac, and indeed it would be extremely expensive. Where exactly would this shared infrastructure come into play?

The single use case that makes sense to me is an infrequently-used CI server for a cross-platform app—something already offered at better rates from CI providers.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#454

Post by npsimons »

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…

> 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

This is the hard thing for me. I just like having so much control of having hardware at home, and I've got static IPs. But it costs to power and cool them, and they aren't elastic like cloud/IaaS. Having started the move to VPSs and finding them very good for the price, I'm now trying to wrap my head around "cattle, not pets", but still with a micropreneur mindset. I think it's still worth it, and my home office is getting quieter with every server I relocate to somebody else's hardware.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#455

Post by mattnewton »

floatboth wrote: post #274
withinrafael wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prior to Big Sur, it's my understanding the macOS SLA explicitly disallowed this. Snippet: > Except as otherwise permitted by the terms of this License or otherwise licensed by Apple: (i) only one user may use the Apple Software at a time, and (ii) you may not make the Apple Software available over a network where it could be run or used by multiple computers at the same time. You may not rent, lease, lend, sell, red…

You could argue that the CI service is the "one user", and it doesn't make the software available over the network, it only makes logs available over the network. This seems like a gray area, "does running a build on your behalf constitute renting out the build environment to you" is a very hard question.

I am not a lawyer but it doesn't seem like a gray area at all to me; you are providing inputs to GitHub and they provide the outputs of mac software over the internet.

What's maybe more of a gray area is whether apple can assert the user doesnt have these rights in their eula.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#456

Post by dang »

saagarjha wrote: post #172

An interesting offering from Amazon that is crippled by Apple and MacStadium, who deserve to be raked over the coals for their recent EULA changes. Just read the post on MacStadium's blog: https://blog.macstadium.com/blog/developers-big-sur-and-vind... Under the new agreement, you must: * Rent to only one organization * Rent for 24 hours at the minimum * Use it for some set of "approved" development work …among other…

Please don't do the "shame on" trope on HN. We don't want the online shaming culture here (https://hn.algolia.com/?query=online%20shaming%20by%3Adang&s...).

The vast majority of the time, situations are complex than internet users think they are. There are two sides to every story, &c. It's fine to make your point, but please stick to the HN rules and make it substantively and thoughtfully. The fact that rage rants get heavily upvoted makes this more important, not less.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#457

Post by reaperducer »

treesknees wrote: post #436
reaperducer wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You mean have opinions and open discussion?

No, dismiss the possibility that there may be things that they don't know about or understand.

"I can only think of two things" doesn't mean "there are only two things exactly and everyone else is wrong".

But that's precisely what he said: "exactly two usecases for this service" He didn't write "I can only think of..." You're making stuff up.

Welcome to the Internet

I shall say the same to you, since I've been online since before the internet, back when you had to manually route e-mail, and it took a week to get a message from New York to Paris, if you were lucky.

I see you are new here.

Welcome to HN. I see you're new here. Be sure to read the rules about unhelpful snarky responses.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#458

Post by 0xCMP »

ballenf wrote: post #421
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.

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

Yea this should work because the license merely says it must be on Mac hardware and given that you're not letting everyone share/use the computer like AWS the new restrictions won't really matter.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#459

Post by freedomben »

npsimons wrote: post #454
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…

> 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 This is the hard thing for me. I just like having so much control of having hardware at home, and I've got static IPs. But it costs to power and cool them, and they aren't elastic like cloud/IaaS. Having started the move to VPSs and finding them v…

I'm the same way as you. I love my hardware.

But the real place cloud/IaaS shines for me is when you aggressively scale, both up and down. If you're used to pets and physical machines then you probably over provision a lot. With the cloud you can ride the CPU/memory line a lot closer and scale quickly when needed.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#460

Post by Wowfunhappy »

dang wrote: post #456
saagarjha wrote: post #172

An interesting offering from Amazon that is crippled by Apple and MacStadium, who deserve to be raked over the coals for their recent EULA changes. Just read the post on MacStadium's blog: https://blog.macstadium.com/blog/developers-big-sur-and-vind... Under the new agreement, you must: * Rent to only one organization * Rent for 24 hours at the minimum * Use it for some set of "approved" development work …among other…

Please don't do the "shame on" trope on HN. We don't want the online shaming culture here ( https://hn.algolia.com/?query=online%20shaming%20by%3Adang&s... ). The vast majority of the time, situations are complex than internet users think they are. There are two sides to every story, &c. It's fine to make your point, but please stick to the HN rules and make it substantively and thoughtfully. The fact that rage rants…

Thank you for taking the time to write that! The comment was rubbing me the wrong way when I first saw it, but I wasn't able to put my finger on why, because I agreed with all of the individual points expressed.
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