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Scaleway turns Mac Minis into high‑density, Raspberry Pi–managed servers

scaleway.com

61–70 of 106 posts

Re: Scaleway turns Mac Minis into high‑density, Raspberry Pi–managed servers

#61
post #16

I was interested in provisioning one of these a few months back through Scaleway, but couldn't navigate their sign-up process without it dumping me back to the start everytime. Nor did I receive a reply when I e-mailed their support e-mail. I don't know if that's changed (they had odd pricing too, like Startup vs. Business, of which the difference wasn't clear), but aware. I hope someone has more success than I did.

Scaleway's site and support is horrible, as you've found. But their pricing and offerings are solid and their network is... OK. For the price, they're better than Hetzner... if you can get signed up!

Totally different experience here! For a project I wanted to try “euro cloud”. Something comparable to digital ocean. No need for hyperscaler functionality.

It has been great. Good terraform provider and reliable service. I like their console, although the design feel very vaporwave to me.

Of course stuff can be better, but it is rapidly improving. The way they implemented grafana + user management was shit. But that’s fixed. Grafana still feels bolted on however. And login is a bit weird with their dedibox or whatever button next to the cloud offering. But no where near as confusing as aws is!

Also bumped on a bug in their terraform provider, found a related bug report, contributed some info and it was fixed within two weeks.

Quite happy so far. Running serverless sql, serverless containers. Secrets management and some iam config. No big stuff but quite sure it is capable to run a decently sized saas.

Re: Scaleway turns Mac Minis into high‑density, Raspberry Pi–managed servers

#62
post #6

not sure why the attach rpi for every mac mini, wouldn't it be cheaper to have one rpi and 9 mac minis connectd to 10 port switch? I also wished one day to make cluster out of Apple TVs - they are very cheap (~150usd for version with ethernet) and most likely the new upcoming version will have more powerful A-series apple sillicon. I guess tvOS is just very restricted.

> not sure why the attach rpi for every mac mini, wouldn't it be cheaper to have one rpi and 9 mac minis connectd to 10 port switch? Simple... they're (likely) running something on the Raspberry Pi's that sets them up as USB gadgets, aka the Mac Mini "sees" a virtual keyboard and mouse. That's enough to manage remote provisioning. To replicate that they'd need a KVM switch which doesn't have some weird edge case in h…

That's exactly the purpose of the raspberry they setup in this image

Re: Scaleway turns Mac Minis into high‑density, Raspberry Pi–managed servers

#63

You'd think that from an environmental point of view, Apple would be able to sell packs of Mac Mini boards without the case and packaging for people doing this; with no physical board or electronic change, it would be easy.

but they make more money selling the whole thing

Re: Scaleway turns Mac Minis into high‑density, Raspberry Pi–managed servers

#64
post #52

I was part of the team that built this project at Scaleway, ask me anything

My experience with a mac mini in a small R&D team has been a nightmare : the OS sucks so much for anything that is not a single user (at a time) on the machine, coming from the Systemd/Linux world What was your experience ?

Yes, the experience is pretty bad, we were doing baremetal, so I assume there were only a single user on it. The tooling and its documentation was really bad too, actually we based ourselves on the asahi project and its documentation and some open-source project that did a lot of work on reverse engineering all of the system we used.

From a user based perspective, using the remote desktop feature was a pain and I don't think any of our users were actually using it, the main use was : CI, AI training and bitcoin mining.

Re: Scaleway turns Mac Minis into high‑density, Raspberry Pi–managed servers

#65

Reminded me how Victor Taelin built his distributed computing cluster using those. https://xcancel.com/VictorTaelin/status/1901661374444392951#...

Hope the resale value is still good on those machines, he hasn't mentioned the cluster on his Twitter in months...

Re: Scaleway turns Mac Minis into high‑density, Raspberry Pi–managed servers

#66

You'd think that from an environmental point of view, Apple would be able to sell packs of Mac Mini boards without the case and packaging for people doing this; with no physical board or electronic change, it would be easy.

Yes, and the actual license is pretty limiting as we have to sell the mac for at least 24h, not less, and no virtualization.

Re: Scaleway turns Mac Minis into high‑density, Raspberry Pi–managed servers

#67
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting that they run them upside down.

It’s because the power button is on the bottom.

Actually the power button is pretty useless, they set it up like this for the airflow as the mac mini fans are on the back.

Re: Scaleway turns Mac Minis into high‑density, Raspberry Pi–managed servers

#68
post #5

Todays game of was it AI generated? > The compact size of the Mac mini, which packs a powerful System on a Chip (SoC) into a tiny footprint.The energy efficiency of Apple silicon (M-series) chips, which allows high density without overheating or excessive power draw. This really adds nothing to the article, and looks like AI fluff to me. Combine that with there being a bold section in like every single paragraph, I'm…

If it smells like ai…

[deleted]

Re: Scaleway turns Mac Minis into high‑density, Raspberry Pi–managed servers

#69
post #6

not sure why the attach rpi for every mac mini, wouldn't it be cheaper to have one rpi and 9 mac minis connectd to 10 port switch? I also wished one day to make cluster out of Apple TVs - they are very cheap (~150usd for version with ethernet) and most likely the new upcoming version will have more powerful A-series apple sillicon. I guess tvOS is just very restricted.

[deleted]
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