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Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

aws.amazon.com

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Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#71

Post by dvtrn »

dharmab wrote: post #40
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…

Alternatively, Apple might gain revenue from iOS and macOS builds becoming more accessible, allowing more small businesses to support their hardware.

Alternatively, Apple might gain revenue from iOS and macOS builds becoming more accessible

Wishful thinking: resurrect the xserve. Give me that 1U Apple appliance so I can stop stacking up Mac Minis (we have an incredibly non-trivial amount of iOS development happening across multiple divisions. Current Mac Mini count: 8)

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#72

Post by easton »

ThinkBeat wrote: post #63

AWS 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…

The video in the article literally shows trucks and pallets of retail Mac Minis being unloaded to be installed into a data center, so I think that’s exactly what they are doing. I doubt Apple would commission custom hardware for AWS when VMWare has most likely been begging for years to no avail.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#73

Post by moonchild »

KingMachiavelli wrote: post #56

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 fi…

That's a minimum of 24 hours, not a maximum. As the sibling says, this is condition of apple's EULA.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#74

Post by philliphaydon »

shiftpgdn wrote: post #67
ThinkBeat wrote: post #63

AWS 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.

AWS probably would have had them sooner if it wasn’t for the t&c...

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#75

Post by barkingcat »

ThinkBeat wrote: post #63

AWS 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…

"I dont see Amazon going out and buying 50.000 Mac minis and racking them" ...

you usually don't see this kind of thing unless you work at the actual place, or you have a colo where Amazon also hosts stuff. Unless you work there, you don't actually know whether they buy that number.

In fact, I bet you they do buy over tens of thousands of Macs of all kinds every quarter, if only to satisfy the demand for hardware for engineers and for testing purposes.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#76

Post by dheera »

wyldfire wrote: post #64
etaioinshrdlu wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can also run a MacOS VM in VirtualBox on Ubuntu. No Apple hardware needed.

https://github.com/myspaghetti/macos-virtualbox

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#77

Post by techscruggs »

xyst wrote: post #69

AWS 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.

At Amazon's scale, betting on M1 servers for a niche subset of their EC2 offering doesn't seem to be really risky.

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#78

Post by novok »

xyst wrote: post #69

AWS 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.

macstadium has been doing this for a while, but it can be unstable and annoying at times. If they can be better than macstadium then it is compelling for iOS dev shops who don't want to maintain a fleet of mac mini build servers. Also amazon can use it themselves for their own CI services

Re: Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

#79

Post by saghm »

joana035 wrote: post #25
MattGaiser wrote: post #3

Amazon is announcing a new thing every week at this rate.

Dedicated servers is not a "new thing".

That's a kind of strange take on this. EC2 didn't offer MacOS before, and now it will. How else would you describe it other than a "new feature"?
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