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Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

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Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#471

Post by pishpash »

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…

The thing with scaledowns is that scaledowns usually never happens. It also costs money to build scaledown logic and build around elastic resources.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#472

Post by quicklyfrozen »

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's a lot easier to click a button on the AWS console then to get approval to buy new capital equipment, or to get approval to use a new vendor (for which we'd likely need legal review, security audits, etc.).

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#473

Post by wicket »

reaperducer wrote: post #425
wicket wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, bu…

As far as I'm aware, if you go for Orka Cloud, you only pay for the physical Mac, not the VMs. I've no idea about the hobbiest market, I've only used MacStadium for a large company. I didn't personally make the purchase but that's the information that has been relayed to me.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#474

Post by AnHonestComment »

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.

Here is a rough cost of standing up a Mac test fleet, corporate:

1. 200 Macs at $2-3k each; $500k total.

2. A data center, in the office, with $250k of retrofit.

3. A LAN network that can support 2Tbps cross talk; about $250k.

4. Data center control software; four engineers for a year @ 1M all-in.

So you’re talking about $2M just to turn the lights on for a data center test suite, and about $10k/Mac installed.

I’d guess $5k/yr is justified in just not having to write you own “EC2 for Mac” or deal with hybrid clouds.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#475

Post by awinter-py »

apapli wrote: post #192
awinter-py wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how are you developing for ios without frequent compiling and testing?

Expo.io is good enough for my needs. Cross platform, just run it on my iPhone and and android simulator. Also, the way expo works is that not all updates need to go through the App Store approvals. I can quickly dev/test/release once I have the app container approved by the relevant store.

very cool

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#476

Post by thrwn_frthr_awy »

detaro wrote: post #70
thrwn_frthr_awy wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They must or someone else will.

Nobody will without Apple allowing it and taking part, and Apple has not been supportive of things like this. E.g. any macOS hoster and many companies doing macOS software would love to throw money at Apple for permission to run "hackintoshes", but no dice, and the structure of this offering suggests AWS didn't get special treatment either.

I don't think I'm understanding. You are saying nobody will do it without Apple's support, but then say that AWS is doing it. There have been Mac Mini hosting for years, so I'm missing what is different about this.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#477

Post by tootie »

rsync wrote: post #407
tootie wrote: post #50

"The instances are launched as EC2 Dedicated Hosts with a minimum tenancy of 24 hours" These are just rentable Mac Minis, not VMs. This will have only one use case and that's for build servers. Unless anyone has scalable AppleScript jobs to run?

"These are just rentable Mac Minis, not VMs. This will have only one use case and that's for build servers." It's difficult for me to believe that a hyper-scaled cloud deployment like AWS will rent individual mac minis to people. It sounds like a business idea I would have and then come to realize how labor intensive and inefficient the entire thing was. At the same time, I wonder why there is not a well developed, w…

In the past when we needs iOS jobs to run from Jenkins we literally plugged a Mac Mini into the wall and forwarded a port from the router so it was reachable as a build agent by our cloud instance of Jenkins.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#478

Post by inopinatus »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #249
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…

> Since my duty cycle for a Mac Mini is rather less than 20%, the economics even of on-demand instances immediately make sense, Are you factoring in the 24 hour minimum AWS charges for a Mac Mini?

Yes. The details don't particularly matter, but broadly, it's periodic QA of a couple of apps & tools vs Safari, vs OSX, and vs homebrew. Not CI/CD.

OSX seems more prone to bitroot regressions than Windows or Linux, I suppose Apple have a "you're with us, or you're against us" attitude and this even applies to base OS backwards (in)compatibility.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#479

Post by floatboth »

mattnewton wrote: post #455
floatboth wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But "they provide the outputs" is the gray area – does providing the outputs count as renting out the software itself?

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#480

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

mritun wrote: post #438
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 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 o…

For what Amazon is asking, one could have both an extra hot _and_ an extra cold standby locally, so it still doesn't make economic sense for a large company.
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