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Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

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Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#491

Post by kgantchev »

sokoloff wrote: post #426
kgantchev wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It represents an opportunity to MacStadium as well, since they too would be able to sell the hardware by the hour. Currently, the only reason they can't is due to the EULA. There is no other reason why a mac hardware hosting company couldn't sell hourly access to a Mac machine.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#492

Post by saagarjha »

coldtea wrote: post #350
saagarjha wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, thanks for weighing in. I'm sure you picked up that I'm pretty mad, but I'll try to tone it down a little bit. I'm not an Amazon employee or someone who is personally harmed by this or anything, aside from being a developer for Apple's platforms who occasionally looks around for CI services. I'm mostly arguing about the principle of the thing. Anyways: I read your blog post back when it came out. Whether Apple to…

> aside from being a developer for Apple's platforms who occasionally looks around for CI services So, you give him all this shit and you're not even using his service? > There's still a huge hole for a service that lets you rent a Mac for the a couple minutes so you can build your Xcode project. It's not your fault that doesn't exist, it's Apple's. If we're talking for CI of builds, sure. But in that case, one would…

Yes, I think I reserve the right to judge him for a decision that hurts iOS/macOS developers as a whole. Can't I judge Facebook for being a privacy violating nightmare even though I've never had an account with them?

As for your other comments: I know what CI is; I use it daily! The way my CI runs (which is how most CI is!) is that a when a commit gets pushed a machine gets spun up to build it, then a few minutes later it shuts itself down once the compilation is complete. Why would I want to pay to have a Mac for an entire day in this scenario? I'd have to be pushing code every few minutes to have any hope of efficiently using one machine.

And believe me, I hate cross-platform garbage apps just as much as you do. But I am not in favor of putting arbitrary restrictions on how people can write their apps. Xcode used to be a soft-requirement to build apps and look how well that worked out: native developers have to stick with it all the time, even when it's acting up and being buggy, and developers who couldn't care less have reverse engineered it to the point where they either generate an Xcode project from a source tree and build from the command line, or they just package their own app bundle themselves with the magic bits that Xcode would usually apply. Trying to stop people from making garbage apps by limiting their tooling options rarely works. And, in fact, I personally know people who go services like MacStadium (VNCing in) to use Xcode for the couple days it takes to set up a build system with the right certificates and profiles, then they never touch a Mac ever again. It's the native developers with their own Macs who want to use a fresh machine to build their code for Mojave or something that they aren't running on their personal computers.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#493

Post by Aeolun »

dfabulich wrote: post #431
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 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…

> 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.

Not at all. MacStadium is not inside the AWS network, so there’s nothing comparable about it.

I’m not sure why they went for a 24h minimum though. That defeats the entire point of cloud computing for me.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#494

Post by Aeolun »

inopinatus wrote: post #486
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In a very substantial number of enterprises; the cost of procuring, validating, installing, powering, cooling, fire-rating, commissioning, maintaining, writing up, handing over, revising, reporting, auditing, approving, and very occasionally actually executing those hot cold standby procedures, exceeds the entire purchase cost of the cold standby unit .

Hell, the company will spend more money on agonizing over the question of whether we should buy a $1500 Mac in the first place.

Besides, if your cloud spend is already a fuckton, $24 per day extra is not going to make you blink.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#495

Post by williamscales »

coldtea wrote: post #399
hobs wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like you and I think your posts are generally high quality, so I am going to say that an elitist "screw people who cant afford an overpriced mac" is not a good thing imo. Will we get some lower quality apps, sure, do those already exist? yeah. It just sounds like gatekeeping for not much benefit.

> I like you and I think your posts are generally high quality Thanks! I try to add the ocassional low quality comment for balance :-) > so I am going to say that an elitist "screw people who cant afford an overpriced mac" is not a good thing imo. Well, my intented meaning was more like "Don't create/sell apps for a platform you dont even own to test in". The main reason to go for "by the minute" builds on the Cloud…

> The main reason to go for "by the minute" builds on the Cloud for a machine you don't own is to either help with porting to an architecture you don't use, or to churn apps with some cross platform framework to a platform you don't use/care about.

You can also go for "by the minute" builds on the Cloud for a machine you do own. Suppose the developers and testers have Macs on their desks, but you still want to have your CI run in the Cloud. Now I'm not an expert on cloud pricing so I could be wrong, but I imagine you could benefit from paying by the minute in that case, depending on the specifics of your situation (builds per day, time per build, total cost of ownership of having a build farm in house).

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#496

Post by mackey »

Aeolun wrote: post #493
dfabulich wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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. Not at all. MacStadium is not inside the AWS network, so there’s nothing comparable about it. I’m not sure why they went for a 24h minimum though. That defeats the entire point of cloud computing for me.

That 24 hour minimum is based on Apple license agreement.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#497

Post by _alex_ »

Aeolun wrote: post #494
inopinatus wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a very substantial number of enterprises; the cost of procuring, validating, installing, powering, cooling, fire-rating, commissioning, maintaining, writing up, handing over, revising, reporting, auditing, approving, and very occasionally actually executing those hot cold standby procedures, exceeds the entire purchase cost of the cold standby unit .

Hell, the company will spend more money on agonizing over the question of whether we should buy a $1500 Mac in the first place. Besides, if your cloud spend is already a fuckton, $24 per day extra is not going to make you blink.

for real. I used to work at a large company in highly regulated industry with lots of scrutiny on our books. The number of meetings and program proposals it would take just to get finance to agree to the capex of standing up a dozen mac minis would easily dwarf the hardware cost. That's before you get to the actual work. From my experience, saying "we're just going to increase our EC2 spend" is a no-brainer

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#498

Post by thrwn_frthr_awy »

detaro wrote: post #490
thrwn_frthr_awy wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nobody will put M1 chips on their own motherboards/blades without Apple support. This is just offering Mac Mini hosting integrated in AWS' platform, with some custom hardware (that AWS also uses elsewhere) attached to the Mac Minis for storage virtualization etc.

Gotcha. Yes, that was what I was referring to as well. I don't think I was very clear in my original comment. I just meant if AWS doesn't offer M1's via Mac Minis that someone else will.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#499

Post by fingerlocks »

apapli wrote: post #171
fingerlocks wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still need to run `xcodebuild` at produce a binary.

expo build:ios actually. My only need for a Mac with expo is for the upload. The apk file is taken care of with the command above. I have an iPhone I use for development and testing. Bonus points is that expo is cross platform, so I can publish to google play with the same single code base too.

that command invokes `xcodebuild` behind the scenes. I'm very familiar with expo, and it's fragility and warts.

I'm glad it's working for you, so far, but try to do anything slightly interesting and you'll have problems.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#500

Post by thayne »

ampdepolymerase wrote: post #439
throwawayffffas wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

IANAL, but I think only if you have monopoly power (at least as I understand US antitrust law), and MS doesn't really have a monopoly on the server OS market.
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