This will be huge long term for enabling cloud AI to automate human tasks when interacting with a computer.
Amazon EC2 Mac Instances
61–70 of 511 posts
Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances
#62Interesting. 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 fi…
There’s a good blog post from Macstadium explaining the recent EULA changes. 24 hours is mentioned there. https://blog.macstadium.com/blog/developers-big-sur-and-vind...
Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances
#63AWS have pretty heavily modified "pc"s they use to fit all their requirements for most of their servers.
I dont see Amazon going out and buying 50.000 Mac minis and racking them.
Do you think Apple is delivering heavily customised and rackable "Mac mini" servers to AWS?
Or is there a 3rd party converting Mac mini suitable for AWS.
Or is AWS actually rack Mac mini computers?
I wonder if this will be an AWS exclusive for N amount of time? I am sure other cloud providers will want their own Mac "servers" now.
Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances
#64"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...
In terms of "other people's computers" it seems to fit well. Nice to be able to build/CI test against macOS without having to provision and maintain apple hardware.
Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances
#65Interesting. 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 fi…
> Powered by Mac mini hardware and the AWS Nitro System
Similarly, other Mac server farms use Apple hardware. I can't think of the name right now but I remember one popular provider racking trash can Mac Pro's.
Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances
#66I wander about the pricing...
$1.083 per hour, but you have to pre-pay for 24 hours to start one up. After that, it's billed by the second.
Where do you see that? There's no price for mac1.metal instances listed on https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/dedicated-hosts/pricing/
EDIT: It shows up now.
Ah, it presumably comes directly from @flardinois's reporting for TechCrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/30/aws-brings-the-mac-mini-to...
Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances
#67AWS have pretty heavily modified "pc"s they use to fit all their requirements for most of their servers. I dont see Amazon going out and buying 50.000 Mac minis and racking them. Do you think Apple is delivering heavily customised and rackable "Mac mini" servers to AWS? Or is there a 3rd party converting Mac mini suitable for AWS. Or is AWS actually rack Mac mini computers? I wonder if this will be an AWS exclusive f…
Rentable Mac Mini (or Mac colo of all flavors) has been a thing for easily 15+ years. https://www.macstadium.com/ is one of the original providers if I recall correctly. I remember renting a macmini for a month when the app store on ios first came out because I couldn't afford a macbook.
AWS is largely taking other peoples efforts and putting the Amazon brand on them.
Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances
#68Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances
#69AWS is playing the long game and betting that M1 based servers start to take off. It's very risky (and expensive) but it would pay off if they are correct.
They would be first in the market and be years ahead of their competition.
Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Woah! Are they adding the M1 chip to/in their datacenter servers/blades?
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.