Amazon EC2 Mac Instances • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#51

Post by spaceflunky » Tue, Dec 01, 2020, 5:02 AM UTC

apapli wrote: post #19

Interesting. The deciding factor for our family when buying a Mac or Windows 10 device for my wife’s small business was actually my need to upload iOS apps for review by apple. I’m an after hours hobby developer, and use a windows desktop. It’s powerful and has all the tooling I require. And it supports all the games I want to play from the steam store. So - I think apple will lose a little bit of business from peopl…

Those AWS images running OSX aren't free. Apple is definitely getting some royalty.

And that royalty is basically very low overhead. Keep in mind, hardware isn't software, and it does have a very high overhead.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#52

Post by thrwn_frthr_awy » Tue, Dec 01, 2020, 5:04 AM UTC

tsjq wrote: post #26

porphyra wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> EC2 Mac instances with the Apple M1 chip are already in the works, and planned for 2021. Also for those wondering

Woah! Are they adding the M1 chip to/in their datacenter servers/blades?

They must or someone else will.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#53

Post by mxie-ca » Tue, Dec 01, 2020, 5:05 AM UTC

They are announcing this ahead of the re:invent keynote. Now I'm more curious what they will announce later this week.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#54

Post by etaioinshrdlu » Tue, Dec 01, 2020, 5:05 AM UTC

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?

Kind of hilarious. This is barely cloud computing compared to the rest of ec2, which has per-second billing...

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#55

Post by joana035 » Tue, Dec 01, 2020, 5:06 AM UTC

mark242 wrote: post #13

anonu wrote: post #7

What's a serious use case for this?

CI/CD for iOS, MacOS, and React Native builds. Right now the pricing for Mac instances for builds via Github, Gitlab, Circle, etc are ludicrous. For a certain developer velocity, these instances will probably be much, much cheaper than running builds through the CI/CD SaaS providers.

Sorry, but dedicated hosts are expensive AF, it is not a virtual machine, you pay for the hardware.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#56

Post by KingMachiavelli » Tue, Dec 01, 2020, 5:06 AM UTC

Interesting. I guess it's not the first but does the MacOS EULA really allow for this? Or does AWS have a special license? Which would beg the question as for the need of real hardware. (Sure you can break a EULA but at some point it would violate ToS and Apple could easily block updates).

> The instances are launched as EC2 Dedicated Hosts with a minimum tenancy of 24 hours.

This almost sounds like they are using first sale doctrine to just lend it for a day. Like I can lend a movie but I can't make my own movie theater (right?).

Also I'm very curious of these are in-tack macs or shucked and put in a frankenstein case of dozens.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#57

Post by ackbar03 » Tue, Dec 01, 2020, 5:06 AM UTC

ianmobbs wrote: post #48

This could be huge for the ecosystem. For example, there are ways to use third-party iMessage clients (e.g. through Matrix) that require you to keep a server running on your local macOS machine signed in to your AppleID - this could let developers create hosted versions of those services

This seems super hacky though

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#58

Post by jaaron » Tue, Dec 01, 2020, 5:07 AM UTC

anonu wrote: post #7

What's a serious use case for this?

As with everyone else, the answer is CI/CD. Having run a team that built out its own Mac build farm... it's a pain.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#59

Post by detaro » Tue, Dec 01, 2020, 5:07 AM UTC

ackbar03 wrote: post #57

ianmobbs wrote: post #48

This could be huge for the ecosystem. For example, there are ways to use third-party iMessage clients (e.g. through Matrix) that require you to keep a server running on your local macOS machine signed in to your AppleID - this could let developers create hosted versions of those services

This seems super hacky though

not to mention expensive.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#60

Post by xyst » Tue, Dec 01, 2020, 5:07 AM UTC

banana_giraffe wrote: post #42

No mention of pricing that I can see, and I don't see it on ec2instances, AWS's pricing page, or the spot-pricing widget on the console. Am I missing something? Edit: And the reserved instances widget (I was going to guess based off this cost) just flat out breaks when you pick mac. I guess we're still in the "If you have to ask, it's too expensive" stage, or something.

It's probably very expensive, or maybe they haven't updated the aws landing page yet.