Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#1

Post by ManishR » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 4:43 PM UTC

Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances
aws.amazon.com

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#2

Post by nicoburns » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 4:58 PM UTC

The 24 hour minimum pricing model for these really sucks. My understanding is that this is a condition of Apple's license to Amazon to run macOS on these machines, and I can't work out why they'd do it.

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#3

Post by SavantIdiot » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 4:58 PM UTC

Naive question: are these literally closets full of Macs? Or giant m1 MP servers?

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#4

Post by MBCook » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 4:59 PM UTC

SavantIdiot wrote: post #3

Naive question: are these literally closets full of Macs? Or giant m1 MP servers?

I don’t think Apple would make anything like that so I’d assume racks of Mac Minis.

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#5

Post by emodendroket » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 5:00 PM UTC

Yeah, this is huge, especially for hobbyists. The M1 is a great laptop but being freed from buying one just to build for iOS is still cool.

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#6

Post by sagz » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 5:00 PM UTC

SavantIdiot wrote: post #3

Naive question: are these literally closets full of Macs? Or giant m1 MP servers?

They are mac minis: https://d2908q01vomqb2.cloudfront.net/da4b9237bacccdf19c0760...

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#7

Post by emodendroket » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 5:00 PM UTC

SavantIdiot wrote: post #3

Naive question: are these literally closets full of Macs? Or giant m1 MP servers?

> EC2 M1 Mac instances are powered by a combination of two hardware components:

>The Mac mini, featuring M1 SoC with 8 CPU cores, 8 GPU cores, 16 GiB of memory, and a 16 core Apple Neural Engine.

>The AWS Nitro System, providing up to 10 Gbps of VPC network bandwidth and 8 Gbps of EBS storage bandwidth through a high-speed Thunderbolt connection.

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#8

Post by speedgoose » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 5:01 PM UTC

Many months later and more than 5 times more expensive than Scaleway though.

https://www.scaleway.com/en/hello-m1/

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#9

Post by mmastrac » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 5:02 PM UTC

emodendroket wrote: post #5

Yeah, this is huge, especially for hobbyists. The M1 is a great laptop but being freed from buying one just to build for iOS is still cool.

You need to dedicate the instance for a full 24 hours, so if you're doing daily builds you'll probably end up paying for a mac mini every month.

Not that I'd ever do or recommend it in a commercial setting, but hobbyists should probably just fire up something like https://github.com/kholia/OSX-KVM to do builds.

Re: Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

#10

Post by reaperducer » Thu, Dec 02, 2021, 5:02 PM UTC

nicoburns wrote: post #2

The 24 hour minimum pricing model for these really sucks. My understanding is that this is a condition of Apple's license to Amazon to run macOS on these machines, and I can't work out why they'd do it.

My guess is that its market research shows that for a profitable number of people, the 24-hour requirement isn't a big deal.

It's not like Amazon doesn't have the ability or experience to research business decisions before they're made.