55 ms·

Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

1091 points by appwiz 6y ago

aeharding 6y ago
I guess this confirms 10gbe m1 minis in 2021?
- BillinghamJ 6y ago
  No particular indication of that. This runs over Thunderbolt 3 anyway
VelNZ 6y ago
Does this mean one could make use of the large collection of premium fonts available on macOS commercially?
- fakedang 6y ago
  I don't think anyone can use the premium fonts at all. You mean the San Francisco and New York fonts right?
logicslave 6y ago
AWS THE POWER HOUSE
MattGaiser 6y ago
Amazon is announcing a new thing every week at this rate.
- brodouevencode 6y ago
  Well, it is reInvent time so there's more than normal. But you are right - follow their news feed and there's several changes happening weekly.
- SilasX 6y ago
  Not service outages though.
- joana035 6y ago
  Dedicated servers is not a "new thing".
  - saghm 6y ago
    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"?
- Uehreka 6y ago
  re:Invent is this week, and tomorrow morning is the keynote, so expect like, 5 AWS-related stories on the front page tomorrow.
  - jedberg 6y ago
    Reinvent lasts three weeks now, and the major keynotes are each Tuesday, so you can expect AWS front page three Tuesdays in a row!
paxys 6y ago
> The instances feature an 8th generation, 6-core Intel Core i7 (Coffee Lake) processor For those wondering
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- porphyra 6y ago
  > EC2 Mac instances with the Apple M1 chip are already in the works, and planned for 2021. Also for those wondering
  - tsjq 6y ago
    Woah! Are they adding the M1 chip to/in their datacenter servers/blades?
    - core-questions 6y ago
      If the current offering is Mac Minis, chances are Amazon has built an industrial grade version of what https://www.macstadium.com/ https://www.macstadium.com/ offers, and have racks with tons of Mac Minis, probably with custom ducting for A/C and so forth.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - geofft 6y ago
      The current offering being announced is Mac Minis (presumably rackmounted by being on shelves, or something), and the new Mac Mini is M1-based. The macOS EULA says you can only run it on Apple hardware, so your options are basically Mac Minis or the new rackmountable Mac Pro.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - thrwn_frthr_awy 6y ago
mhxion 6y ago
> As always, I asked the EC2 team for access to an instance in order to put it through its paces. The instances are available in Dedicated Host form, so I started by allocating a host. Dedicated Hosts (https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/dedicated-hosts/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/dedicated-hosts/) are more pricey than virtual instances (most EC2) and Dedicated Instances. Not sure if it's possible to containerize/sell as many virtual instances off a dedicated server without paying a separate high license fee to Apple.
- floatingatoll 6y ago
  Apple’s licensing terms for macOS permit only the licensing of one unit of Apple macOS running on one unit of Apple hardware to one customer for a minimum term of one day. There is no option to purchase a virtual-machine or other shared-instance license when macOS is involved. (Nitpicky points: I believe the customer can do whatever they want with their licensed cloud Mac hardware, such as dual-boot different releases of macOS or virtualize to their heart’s content, as long as they are the exclusive user of the Apple hardware underlying any instances of macOS. “One customer per Mac per day, no more and no less” is probably a better summary in hindsight.)
  - niklasrde 6y ago
    More days or less customers is also ok.
    - floatingatoll 6y ago
      Yup! There are additional nitpicks that haven't yet been discovered, I'm cheering you on from the sidelines.
anonu 6y ago
What's a serious use case for this?
- brodouevencode 6y ago
  We have an internal application that would benefit from having local access to our network infrastructure (VPC) without needing a VPN.
- mark242 6y ago
  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.
  - joana035 6y ago
    Sorry, but dedicated hosts are expensive AF, it is not a virtual machine, you pay for the hardware.
    - detaro 6y ago
      $26 per day according to TC, for a full Mini (6 core i7/32 GB RAM). If you do enough that you can get high utilization that is cheaper than the CI services. (e.g. travis wants close to double for 2 vCore/8GB VMs) EDIT: On the other hand, renting a physical machine at Macstadium is a lot cheaper, so you'll want to have the AWS integration or some flexibility...
- ravedave5 6y ago
  Builds without having to maintain your own macs.
- chadash 6y ago
  I have the same question. Why would I want this over a Linux instance (assuming the latter is cheaper)?
StratusBen 6y ago
Seems like a major new growth vertical for AWS and gives Apple the ability to vet this [if its successful] for potentially launching their own offering one day.
apapli 6y ago
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 people like me with this announcement, as I’m sure we would not have purchased a Mac when we did only a few months ago.
- usmannk 6y ago
  How are you developing iOS apps without xcode?
  - kerng 6y ago
    You only need it for compiling. There are plenty of cross platform frameworks that dont require to develop with xcode - and that's good in my opinion. I built all my apps this way and faced the same problem as OP - so had to buy a Mac mini. It was the cheapest option ~8 years ago and I still use it today for the same purpose - just for compiling. I assume there are probably more of us.
    - qppo 6y ago
      How do you deal with platform specific bugs? What about testing? About 50% of my MacOS usage is replicating bug reports from users. I don't know how I would do that without having one on my desk.
      - apapli 6y ago
        My needs are simple enough that the standard inclusions in expo.io work without complication. I could imagine more complex apps need a more involved dev setup but not in my case.
      - kerng 6y ago
        I really haven't faced many.. anything significant is usually fixed by the framework. Maybe more iOS specific bugs are introduced when doing iOS specific development (like using iOS tooling and techniques).
gfody 6y ago
with everything else going on maybe we'll see virtualbox guest additions for macOS
Shakahs 6y ago
MacOS AMI images, EBS disks, VPC networking, 10gbps ENA. Bare metal only, Intel available now, M1 coming soon. This is another game changer. The post says they’re based on Mac Minis, but also use AWS Nitro. Is this custom AWS specific hardware?
- sneak 6y ago
  Yes, AIUI AWS Nitro is a PCI (in this case thunderbolt?) disk abstraction system that fronts EBS for the host.
  - Shakahs 6y ago
    That sounds elegant for IO, but I wonder how device level security is handled, out of band management, and firmware updates.
    - shiftpgdn 6y ago
      BSDP + IPKVM?
- NathanWilliams 6y ago
  Over Thunderbolt: https://twitter.com/_msw_/status/1333629867171057664?s=21 https://twitter.com/_msw_/status/1333629867171057664?s=21
  - boulos 6y ago
    Right. The Nitro cards speak PCIe, and Thunderbolt is “just” PCIe plus DP in one: > Thunderbolt combines PCI Express (PCIe) and DisplayPort (DP) into two serial signals,[7][8] and additionally provides DC power, all in one cable. From the Wikipedia entry at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderbolt_(interface) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderbolt_(interface)
geofft 6y ago
I can't seem to find pricing for this - anyone understand AWS better than me? It's not listed on their dedicated host pricing page at https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/dedicated-hosts/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/dedicated-hosts/pricing/ , and if I go through the web console to create an instance, I'm prompted to create a Mac dedicated host without any indication of how much I'd be paying.
- joana035 6y ago
  You have to be logged in to see the prices.
  - geofft 6y ago
    I am logged in, and I see prices for other dedicated host types (and I saw them even before I was logged in) but not mac1.metal. Do you see the price?
    - joana035 6y ago
      Ah no, sorry, the dedicated hosted pages used to not show any price when not logged in.
- detaro 6y ago
  per techcrunch article linked elsewhere in the thread $1.083/h
riffic 6y ago
Now when will macOS support native containerization? note: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21333408 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21333408
- nhumrich 6y ago
  never
samwestdev 6y ago
I wander about the pricing...
- arthurcolle 6y ago
  $999.99 per month. "We wanted to redefine how people interact with macOS, on a deeper, ... and more granular level. Truly redefining the user experience and rethinking what was really possible, in the cloud." Slogan for new product line: "A silver lining."
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- flardinois 6y ago
  $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.
  - dfabulich 6y ago
    Where do you see that? There's no price for mac1.metal instances listed on https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/dedicated-hosts/pricing/ 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-its-cloud/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/30/aws-brings-the-mac-mini-to...
  - sramam 6y ago
    Could you point to the source of this information? It wasn't obvious to me.
  - cultofmetatron 6y ago
    omg... if you use it sigificatly (ie: every day) you might as well buy a physical mac mini and keep it at home. it'll pay for itself in a month!
banana_giraffe 6y ago
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.
- xyst 6y ago
  It's probably very expensive, or maybe they haven't updated the aws landing page yet.
  - baggy_trough 6y ago
    It’s about $1 per hour.
    - monsieurbanana 6y ago
      Please tell me this is a typo, and you actually meant $1/day.
      - detaro 6y ago
        not a typo. $1/day would be extremely cheap.
      - baggy_trough 6y ago
        Afraid not, but you can get much better pricing at MacStadium.
        twistedpair 6y ago
        Does that include their Mac Cloud offering with custom networking/subnets, or the per Mac Mini rentals? Generally the cloud services (similar to AWS) are pricier.
- banana_giraffe 6y ago
offtop5 6y ago
Awesome. I'll still keep a Mac mini since I like Logic, but this is very very good for say a Unity or Flutter developer who needs to deploy apps to iOS
- filleduchaos 6y ago
  Cloud services to build/deploy for iOS already exist and are nowhere near this over-the-top expensive so no, I don't think cross-platform devs are the target market here.
ianmobbs 6y ago
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
- ackbar03 6y ago
  This seems super hacky though
  - detaro 6y ago
    not to mention expensive.
    - SulfurHexaFluri 6y ago
      $24/day for imessage.. Much much cheaper to just buy a second hand mac mini and leave it plugged in to your router.
- easton 6y ago
  One Mac (serial number) per instance, so you probably couldn’t host iMessage or other access to Apple Services without getting burned after a couple days (and AWS wouldn’t want you doing it and getting a whole rack of Minis banned from iCloud or something).
- thinkingemote 6y ago
  running servers (or anything personal) on these instances are forbidden.
tootie 6y ago
"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?
- etaioinshrdlu 6y ago
  Kind of hilarious. This is barely cloud computing compared to the rest of ec2, which has per-second billing...
  - wyldfire 6y ago
    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.
    - dheera 6y ago
      You can also run a MacOS VM in VirtualBox on Ubuntu. No Apple hardware needed. https://github.com/myspaghetti/macos-virtualbox https://github.com/myspaghetti/macos-virtualbox
      - untog 6y ago
        It's against Apple's T&Cs, though. If you're doing it at home by yourself, who cares. But a company that's interested in automated testing etc. isn't going to see it as an answer.
        dheera 6y ago
        Get an old old old Mac pro from ages ago. Upgrade its motherboard. Then upgrade its RAM. Then upgrade its hard drive. Then upgrade its power supply. It will still be an "Apple-branded computer" because of its case. It will just have received a bunch of upgrades. Big "haha" to them. (Or if you're actually a corporation just buy a Mac.)
mxie-ca 6y ago
They are announcing this ahead of the re:invent keynote. Now I'm more curious what they will announce later this week.
KingMachiavelli 6y ago
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.
- hjuutilainen 6y ago
  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-vindication https://blog.macstadium.com/blog/developers-big-sur-and-vind...
  - yborg 6y ago
    And now we know the real reason for those changes.
- samtheprogram 6y ago
  > 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.
- moonchild 6y ago
  That's a minimum of 24 hours, not a maximum. As the sibling says, this is condition of apple's EULA.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
nicodjimenez 6y ago
This will be huge long term for enabling cloud AI to automate human tasks when interacting with a computer.
- cercatrova 6y ago
  What does this mean? This sentence is so vague as to be meaningless.
  - joana035 6y ago
    GPT3 maybe?
ThinkBeat 6y ago
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 for N amount of time? I am sure other cloud providers will want their own Mac "servers" now.
- shiftpgdn 6y ago
  Rentable Mac Mini (or Mac colo of all flavors) has been a thing for easily 15+ years. https://www.macstadium.com/ 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.
  - philliphaydon 6y ago
    AWS probably would have had them sooner if it wasn’t for the t&c...
- easton 6y ago
  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.
- barkingcat 6y ago
  "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.
xyst 6y ago
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.
- techscruggs 6y ago
  At Amazon's scale, betting on M1 servers for a niche subset of their EC2 offering doesn't seem to be really risky.
- novok 6y ago
  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
- detaro 6y ago
  I doubt this is a play at M1 servers. M1 servers on Apple hardware is not what AWS wants people to use when the alternative is other AWS servers. Only for running macOS there isn't an alternative.
  - dash2 6y ago
    AWS’s value proposition isn’t the hardware. Why wouldn’t they use M1 if it’s best for their customers?
    - detaro 6y ago
      Because they'd much rather use their own high-density server designs instead of dealing with Macs that really aren't made for datacenters, and M1 has no clear must-have benefit over those justifying that effort outside of the macOS use case. Now if Apple were to selling/license M1 chips to them, that might be different, but there is no indication that's going to happen in any way, and then the current work based on Macs wouldn't really be preparation for it.
tekacs 6y ago
It seems like this directly ties back to Apple’s recent policy changes [0]. The details line up exactly, including: - You must rent them for at least 24 hours at a time. - You must rent out one machine per end user. I just feel sorry for all the smaller providers who have done this for years. I wonder if this was Apple’s update prompting AWS, or AWS pushing Apple to make the change — or both. [0]: https://blog.macstadium.com/blog/developers-big-sur-and-vindication https://blog.macstadium.com/blog/developers-big-sur-and-vind...
- fomine3 6y ago
  The author defends Apple's decision to clarify EURA but it looks like get worse for developers.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    The author defends it because it helps them and hurts everyone else.
- nanagojo 6y ago
  Azure piplines has had the ability for quite a while to use macos agents...
  - tobylane 6y ago
    GitHub Actions, which is mostly a copy of Pipelines, has Big Sur while Pipelines doesn’t. Someone points out Circle let’s you ssh in, while afaik GHA and Pipelines don’t. Is this a key difference?
    - oefrha 6y ago
      > Someone points out Circle let’s you ssh in, while afaik GHA and Pipelines don’t That's mostly a convenience feature, you can ssh into GH Actions' macOS instances through something like an ngrok tunnel, or run a terminal sharing tool within to basically do the same. See for instance https://github.com/fastai/fastmac https://github.com/fastai/fastmac. I doubt that's a key difference.
nnx 6y ago
Given how M1 is technically impressive (not only CPU but also for Neural Engine), one can dream Apple will resurrect XServe with multi-socket later versions of their silicon. This kind of performance with this kind of power efficiency would be game changer in data center. Looking forward to Graviton3 as well.
easton 6y ago
Interesting that they’ve mentioned M1 support. That makes me wonder if VMWare is going to get together with Apple and make a ESXi port to Apple Silicon, as the Mac Mini and Mac Pro were long standing on the HWL since they were the only rackable devices on the market legally allowed to virtualize macOS. I’m fairly certain that Apple used it internally for testing. (AWS will probably at least attempt a port of their Nitro hypervisor to M1 as well, since it’d make the machines infinitely easier to manage at scale since Macs no longer have a NetBoot or Internet Recovery option).
- floatboth 6y ago
  AWS does not use netboot, EBS volumes appear as local NVMe drives because their custom Nitro PCIe cards handle that. In the Mac case, they connect the cards using Thunderbolt. The Mac instances will NOT use an AWS provided hypervisor until Apple's terms change. Currently the hosting provider is only allowed to lease the whole machine, only the end user can do virtualization.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
tus88 6y ago
wut
awinter-py 6y ago
how does this affect companies like buddybuild that offer CI/CD for ios? has it commoditized them, or does it give them a lower cost way to run their cluster?
- appwiz 6y ago
  Apple acquired buddybuild in 2018 (https://www.buddybuild.com/blog/buddybuild-is-now-part-of-apple https://www.buddybuild.com/blog/buddybuild-is-now-part-of-ap...). For CI/CD providers, it depends on how they offer the underlying macOS environment. If they target enterprise workloads that have stringent compliance needs, then this offering is a net benefit especially if the enterprise is already on AWS. The cost isn't cheap but there are many ways to price it as a value added provider.
dash2 6y ago
This seems a bit half-baked and niche at the moment. You have to rent a whole machine for 24 hours, which is expensive and prevents on-demand scaling. I wonder if Apple and Amazon are just dipping their toes in to prepare for a deeper collaboration in future.
- howlgarnish 6y ago
  Given the pricing of these instances ($24/day with a 1 day minimum), nobody's going to be deploying their autoscaled k8s clusters on these anytime soon.
- detaro 6y ago
  I'd take the fact that the 24h restriction from Apple's licensing hasn't been removed as a sign that there isn't much collaboration going on. Apple granting an exception from that would seem like a no-brainer if they wanted to support a partner offering this.
madrox 6y ago
This seems 100% about building in XCode, which leaves me wondering why it's being offered as an EC2 instance instead of some higher order build tool. Is there a use case I'm missing?
- howlgarnish 6y ago
  Software compatibility testing is a big one, particularly if/when it's easy to spin up Mac instances with various OS versions installed.
dfabulich 6y ago
Amazon lists the price of mac1 instances (running on rack-mounted Intel Mac Minis) at $1.083 per hour, $9,487 per year. You have to pay for 24 hours up front, after which they bill by the second. https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/dedicated-hosts/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/dedicated-hosts/pricing/ They don't yet display any reservation pricing for mac1 instances, but they do offer a "savings plan." https://aws.amazon.com/savingsplans/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/savingsplans/pricing/ If you pay for three years up front, you can pay $0.764 per hour, $6,692 per year, 29% off. I believe that's the lowest price Amazon will offer you. For comparison, you can rent an equivalent Mac Mini from MacStadium for $139/month, $1,668/year. Or you can rent their cheapest model for $59/month, $708/year. You can also buy the equivalent Mac Mini for $1,899.
- gogopuppygogo 6y ago
  Don’t forget the bandwidth premium you pay at Amazon AWS. Paying these premiums is all in the furtherance of a good cause called “Bezos getting another hundy billion to his name”.
  - zelly 6y ago
    Build your own AWS
    - rualca 6y ago
      Plenty of cloud providers don't charge for bandwidth until you hit an anti-abuse ceiling. For example, Hetzner offers a 20TB bandwidth cap per node. You don't need to buy AWS to get same prices on network.
      - chx 6y ago
        Hetzner dedicated servers (which start below 30 EUR mind you) do not have bandwidth caps for two years now. https://www.hetzner.com/news/traffic-limit/ https://www.hetzner.com/news/traffic-limit/
devops1997 6y ago
How can this be viable cost wise. With their minimum billing of $1.083 an hour, and a minimum of 24 hour billing, unless you want this for a short time only, these costs are way too high. macstasium.com has much lower costs for this.
saagarjha 6y ago
An interesting offering from Amazon that is crippled by Apple and MacStadium, who deserve to be raked over the coals for their recent EULA changes. Just read the post on MacStadium's blog: https://blog.macstadium.com/blog/developers-big-sur-and-vindication https://blog.macstadium.com/blog/developers-big-sur-and-vind... Under the new agreement, you must: * Rent to only one organization * Rent for 24 hours at the minimum * Use it for some set of "approved" development work …among other restrictions. And Brian Stucki is celebrating these changes?! This is a sick joke. You're enjoying a significantly tightened EULA that benefits nobody but yourself, a EULA that means that a single CI build now costs $26 on AWS instead of 50 cents; one that means that more than half the comments here are confused why AWS is ripping people off. Shame on you Brian Stucki, shame on you MacStadium, and shame on you Apple. Your EULA changes are absurdly hostile to developers, since now they're either going to have to buy Macs themselves or rent from MacStadium-like services. Shame on you both for colluding together for making this situation horrible and then having the guts to write that blog post. I can't believe I'm saying this, but Amazon, I feel so sorry for you. You didn't deserve this.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  Maybe those companies should focus their business in countries where EULAs have zero legal value, like EU countries.
  - jraph 6y ago
    Though some of their statements probably don't apply, I think EULAs apply in EU. Software license do apply. Software patents are still not recognized, let's hope this continues for a long time.
    - punnerud 6y ago
      EULA apply, but there is legislations in EU that make terms prohibiting you from reverse engineer, sell, rent or automating null and void.
      - 6y ago
cameldrv 6y ago
Remarkably expensive -- $9400/yr for a $700 computer.
- jbverschoor 6y ago
  Seems about the same ratio aws uses for most things
yarcob 6y ago
At a first glance this sounds exciting: We use a lot of different versions of macOS and Xcode for building our apps. We have one dedicated Mac, and about 5 VMs on a second Mac that we use for building our software. Keeping everything up to date is a pain. So if we could just rent Mac VMs that would be nice. But this is pretty much useless. You get only a single machine for a really high price. Theoretically I could run VMWare on the rented machine, to run multiple virtual copies of macOS, but then I'd be doing all the maintenance that I don't want to do.
- cowsandmilk 6y ago
  I’ll be interested in how long they keep OS versions. This would be really compelling for me if I could run 10.11+ rather than just 10.14 and 10.15.
withinrafael 6y ago
GitHub has been doling out tiny macOS runners in virtual machines for a bit now [1] (seemingly in violation of macOS SLA), and these were hosted on MacStadium [2]! So for MacStadium to come out and pretend they were following the rules the entire time is disappointing. [1] http://web.archive.org/web/20200511183317if_/https://github.com/actions/virtual-environments/issues/835#issuecomment-625619583 http://web.archive.org/web/20200511183317if_/https://github.... [2] http://web.archive.org/web/20201108115438/https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team@latest/actions/reference/specifications-for-github-hosted-runners http://web.archive.org/web/20201108115438/https://docs.githu...
- BillinghamJ 6y ago
  They would have been VMing on top of the machine provided by MacStadium.
- philo23 6y ago
  As weird as it is, I think as long as they provide an entire physical Mac you’re free to run as many macOS virtual hosts on it yourself as you want to. At least that’s my understanding of the EULA explained in the MacStadium blog post.
  - BillinghamJ 6y ago
    Yeah I think the issue here is more likely GitHub not following the EULA
- floatboth 6y ago
  CI runners are kinda different than VM hosting. I mean sure you could abuse them to run sshd and interactively use them for a while :D but the service as intended is that you don't "rent" the VM in any meaningful way, it's fully theirs, they just run your one single job on it and show you the logs.
  - withinrafael 6y ago
    Prior to Big Sur, it's my understanding the macOS SLA explicitly disallowed this. Snippet: > Except as otherwise permitted by the terms of this License or otherwise licensed by Apple: (i) only one user may use the Apple Software at a time, and (ii) you may not make the Apple Software available over a network where it could be run or used by multiple computers at the same time. You may not rent, lease, lend, sell, redistribute or sublicense the Apple Software.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
wewake 6y ago
Boycott Apple completely. How did we go from open development to some overpriced, only half decent and walled mess that's now worth $2 trillion? Shame.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  Because that’s the solution that resulted in my parents not suffering from malware and various toolbars in their browsers. There is no way they or a significant portion of the population was going to learn how to discern good programs from bad, and a walled garden is apparently the option that works.
- hacker_newz 6y ago
  How do you build iOS apps without Apple?
tipsandtricks 6y ago
https://www.techotn.com/top-5-hdmi-2-1-monitors/ https://www.techotn.com/top-5-hdmi-2-1-monitors/ the next level monitors for gaming
thinkingemote 6y ago
You cannot use these as servers. You can only use this for: "Permitted Developer services." This is defined as "continuous integration services, including but not limited to software development, building software from source, automated testing during software development, and running necessary developer tools to support such activities." (from: https://blog.macstadium.com/blog/developers-big-sur-and-vindication https://blog.macstadium.com/blog/developers-big-sur-and-vind... ) So, no servers and no hosting stuff, and no personal use of desktop applications like Photoshop etc
- denysvitali 6y ago
  Well, you can always develop a Photoshop plugin and test it in a very intensive way. Still not worth the price though
gregorymfoster 6y ago
I’m working on https://screenplay.dev https://screenplay.dev, where test every change against a battery of open source iOS apps (Wikipedia, signal, etc). We started on GitHub actions, but found it much cheaper to buys ~4 Mac mini’s and run them in the office. It takes a little love to keep them up to date and stable (maybe an hour a week), but in return we get cheap, debuggable Mac computer. I like that more offerings are appearing, but at this price, we’ll stick to our furnace of Mac mini’s for now.
ftio 6y ago
Someone commented on a previous thread that the M1 Mac mini hadn't changed form factors despite a reduction in component size, lamenting that it had retained the same size and shape as its on-Intel predecessors. This is the reason. Datacenter customers (really, any customers racking minis) likely represent a meaningful share of Mac mini sales. Changing the form factor would mean these high-value customers would need to re-tool their racks to support a new design. Even Apple is not immune to the pressure of large customers.
kevincox 6y ago
I find it disgusting that Apple can force people to jump though these hoops while paying them a huge premium for sub-standard hardware[1] so that these people can develop for their platform. Not only are they bleeding the developers at build, test and sale time. They are providing a shitty experience while doing it. Of course from an economic point of view they are right! For businesses it still makes sense to do this most of the time (especially since webapps are crippled on iOS) due to the large user base. If they didn't have that user base I'd bet very few people would tolerate this crap. This is one of the handful of reasons that I boycott Apple, I find their business practices morally unacceptable. [1] Sub-standard for CI/server use cases.
- jtdev 6y ago
  How are web apps crippled on iOS?
  - snazz 6y ago
    MobileSafari doesn't support a number of "PWA" features that Android Chrome does. Push notifications, for example, always require a mobile app on iOS (which I think is a good thing, personally, but I can understand other perspectives).
    - kevincox 6y ago
      It is behind a permission so it isn't that any website can just start sending you notifications. (Although personally I'm not a fan of phone notifications either)
  - jleach82 6y ago
    Safari support (and even chrome, FF on macs) is horrible. They've become the new IE in terms of typical web programming that works everywhere except that platform. In the past year, every browser-based support issue we've had to deal with across multiple projects is due to Safari not handling things the way the rest of the browsers do. Worse, there's issues that are specific to Apple devices (iPad rendering of certain CSS, works everywhere else, including Mac's own emulators, but renders fubar on the actual iPad), leaving the debugging/fixing process a trial and error issue. It's horrible. And even worse, this can't be debugged on anything but a Mac anymore, so if you don't use Mac as your primary dev platform, you're near-screwed when it comes to trying to resolve web app issues that only arise on their platform. Then there's mobile app management, which is just as bad in it's own way. We had an app on the App Store for three years, then all of a sudden during one minor maintenance update they decided it wasn't allowed on the store any more and immediately pulled it. Thousands of business users affected, and two months to get the app propped back up on a custom business distribution channel, thousands of dollars worth of process re-development, etc. Apple is the absolute worst platform for business-productivity programming. They screw the developers with a far stiffer rod than any other company has ever done.
gumby 6y ago
I assume better terms will be available for Mac and iOS instances available in some future Apple cloud offering.
Shorel 6y ago
Wanted to try one. Then I saw the price...
ryanmarsh 6y ago
Lots of folks in this thread seem to be unaware that other companies offer Mac mini hosting, at less than one tenth the cost. If you don’t need the full AWS ecosystem for your workload it’s worth doing some research.
davidonhacker 6y ago
If you only need CI Azure DevOps has hosted MacOS build agents
hacknat 6y ago
So could I spin one up for 24 hours, then simply power it off and pay by the second thereafter (every time I turn it back on)?
- whoisjohnkid 6y ago
  Huh, great question; I’m curious about this myself. If it works that way then it would def be a lot less pricey.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
bochoh 6y ago
The thing I still don't understand with Mac, even if you were to virtualize it, is that VNC is abysmal compared to RDP from Microsoft. How are people actually /using/ this hardware (short of command line x-code builds)?
paulfurtado 6y ago
I wonder if these can easily run linux AMIs. Since OSX doesn't have native containerization, our CI system for mac builds runs linux on mac minis and runs osx VMs inside of linux since you're allowed to run osx vms on linux if linux is running on mac hardware. So in an ideal world, we'd run our own linux AMI on the baremetal mac instances and run OSX in VMs. I'm sure it's possible of course, but I wonder how painful it would be to setup. Fighting EFI/secureboot? Some other bootloader?
WhyNotHugo 6y ago
I bought a Mac mini for iOS development and gee am I regretting it. Especially this these devices cannot be booted unattended - if it ever powers off, I need to: take it out of the closet, plug it in my desktop, turn off file encryption, put it back in the closet, boot it, VNC in, and finally turn on file encryption again

1091 points by appwiz 6y ago

aeharding 6y ago

I guess this confirms 10gbe m1 minis in 2021?

BillinghamJ 6y ago
No particular indication of that. This runs over Thunderbolt 3 anyway

VelNZ 6y ago

Does this mean one could make use of the large collection of premium fonts available on macOS commercially?

fakedang 6y ago
I don't think anyone can use the premium fonts at all. You mean the San Francisco and New York fonts right?

logicslave 6y ago

AWS THE POWER HOUSE

MattGaiser 6y ago

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

brodouevencode 6y ago
Well, it is reInvent time so there's more than normal. But you are right - follow their news feed and there's several changes happening weekly.
SilasX 6y ago
Not service outages though.
joana035 6y ago
Dedicated servers is not a "new thing".
- saghm 6y ago
  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"?
Uehreka 6y ago
re:Invent is this week, and tomorrow morning is the keynote, so expect like, 5 AWS-related stories on the front page tomorrow.
- jedberg 6y ago
  Reinvent lasts three weeks now, and the major keynotes are each Tuesday, so you can expect AWS front page three Tuesdays in a row!

paxys 6y ago

> The instances feature an 8th generation, 6-core Intel Core i7 (Coffee Lake) processor For those wondering

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
porphyra 6y ago
> EC2 Mac instances with the Apple M1 chip are already in the works, and planned for 2021. Also for those wondering
- tsjq 6y ago
  Woah! Are they adding the M1 chip to/in their datacenter servers/blades?
  - core-questions 6y ago
    If the current offering is Mac Minis, chances are Amazon has built an industrial grade version of what https://www.macstadium.com/ https://www.macstadium.com/ offers, and have racks with tons of Mac Minis, probably with custom ducting for A/C and so forth.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - geofft 6y ago
    The current offering being announced is Mac Minis (presumably rackmounted by being on shelves, or something), and the new Mac Mini is M1-based. The macOS EULA says you can only run it on Apple hardware, so your options are basically Mac Minis or the new rackmountable Mac Pro.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - thrwn_frthr_awy 6y ago

mhxion 6y ago

> As always, I asked the EC2 team for access to an instance in order to put it through its paces. The instances are available in Dedicated Host form, so I started by allocating a host. Dedicated Hosts (https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/dedicated-hosts/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/dedicated-hosts/) are more pricey than virtual instances (most EC2) and Dedicated Instances. Not sure if it's possible to containerize/sell as many virtual instances off a dedicated server without paying a separate high license fee to Apple.

floatingatoll 6y ago
Apple’s licensing terms for macOS permit only the licensing of one unit of Apple macOS running on one unit of Apple hardware to one customer for a minimum term of one day. There is no option to purchase a virtual-machine or other shared-instance license when macOS is involved. (Nitpicky points: I believe the customer can do whatever they want with their licensed cloud Mac hardware, such as dual-boot different releases of macOS or virtualize to their heart’s content, as long as they are the exclusive user of the Apple hardware underlying any instances of macOS. “One customer per Mac per day, no more and no less” is probably a better summary in hindsight.)
- niklasrde 6y ago
  More days or less customers is also ok.
  - floatingatoll 6y ago
    Yup! There are additional nitpicks that haven't yet been discovered, I'm cheering you on from the sidelines.

anonu 6y ago

What's a serious use case for this?

brodouevencode 6y ago
We have an internal application that would benefit from having local access to our network infrastructure (VPC) without needing a VPN.
mark242 6y ago
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.
- joana035 6y ago
  Sorry, but dedicated hosts are expensive AF, it is not a virtual machine, you pay for the hardware.
  - detaro 6y ago
    $26 per day according to TC, for a full Mini (6 core i7/32 GB RAM). If you do enough that you can get high utilization that is cheaper than the CI services. (e.g. travis wants close to double for 2 vCore/8GB VMs) EDIT: On the other hand, renting a physical machine at Macstadium is a lot cheaper, so you'll want to have the AWS integration or some flexibility...
ravedave5 6y ago
Builds without having to maintain your own macs.
chadash 6y ago
I have the same question. Why would I want this over a Linux instance (assuming the latter is cheaper)?

StratusBen 6y ago

Seems like a major new growth vertical for AWS and gives Apple the ability to vet this [if its successful] for potentially launching their own offering one day.

apapli 6y ago

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 people like me with this announcement, as I’m sure we would not have purchased a Mac when we did only a few months ago.

usmannk 6y ago
How are you developing iOS apps without xcode?
- kerng 6y ago
  You only need it for compiling. There are plenty of cross platform frameworks that dont require to develop with xcode - and that's good in my opinion. I built all my apps this way and faced the same problem as OP - so had to buy a Mac mini. It was the cheapest option ~8 years ago and I still use it today for the same purpose - just for compiling. I assume there are probably more of us.
  - qppo 6y ago
    How do you deal with platform specific bugs? What about testing? About 50% of my MacOS usage is replicating bug reports from users. I don't know how I would do that without having one on my desk.
    - apapli 6y ago
      My needs are simple enough that the standard inclusions in expo.io work without complication. I could imagine more complex apps need a more involved dev setup but not in my case.
    - kerng 6y ago
      I really haven't faced many.. anything significant is usually fixed by the framework. Maybe more iOS specific bugs are introduced when doing iOS specific development (like using iOS tooling and techniques).

gfody 6y ago

with everything else going on maybe we'll see virtualbox guest additions for macOS

Shakahs 6y ago

MacOS AMI images, EBS disks, VPC networking, 10gbps ENA. Bare metal only, Intel available now, M1 coming soon. This is another game changer. The post says they’re based on Mac Minis, but also use AWS Nitro. Is this custom AWS specific hardware?

sneak 6y ago
Yes, AIUI AWS Nitro is a PCI (in this case thunderbolt?) disk abstraction system that fronts EBS for the host.
- Shakahs 6y ago
  That sounds elegant for IO, but I wonder how device level security is handled, out of band management, and firmware updates.
  - shiftpgdn 6y ago
    BSDP + IPKVM?
NathanWilliams 6y ago
Over Thunderbolt: https://twitter.com/_msw_/status/1333629867171057664?s=21 https://twitter.com/_msw_/status/1333629867171057664?s=21
- boulos 6y ago
  Right. The Nitro cards speak PCIe, and Thunderbolt is “just” PCIe plus DP in one: > Thunderbolt combines PCI Express (PCIe) and DisplayPort (DP) into two serial signals,[7][8] and additionally provides DC power, all in one cable. From the Wikipedia entry at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderbolt_(interface) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderbolt_(interface)

geofft 6y ago

I can't seem to find pricing for this - anyone understand AWS better than me? It's not listed on their dedicated host pricing page at https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/dedicated-hosts/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/dedicated-hosts/pricing/ , and if I go through the web console to create an instance, I'm prompted to create a Mac dedicated host without any indication of how much I'd be paying.

joana035 6y ago
You have to be logged in to see the prices.
- geofft 6y ago
  I am logged in, and I see prices for other dedicated host types (and I saw them even before I was logged in) but not mac1.metal. Do you see the price?
  - joana035 6y ago
    Ah no, sorry, the dedicated hosted pages used to not show any price when not logged in.
detaro 6y ago
per techcrunch article linked elsewhere in the thread $1.083/h

riffic 6y ago

Now when will macOS support native containerization? note: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21333408 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21333408

nhumrich 6y ago
never

samwestdev 6y ago

I wander about the pricing...

arthurcolle 6y ago
$999.99 per month. "We wanted to redefine how people interact with macOS, on a deeper, ... and more granular level. Truly redefining the user experience and rethinking what was really possible, in the cloud." Slogan for new product line: "A silver lining."
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
flardinois 6y ago
$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.
- dfabulich 6y ago
  Where do you see that? There's no price for mac1.metal instances listed on https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/dedicated-hosts/pricing/ 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-its-cloud/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/30/aws-brings-the-mac-mini-to...
- sramam 6y ago
  Could you point to the source of this information? It wasn't obvious to me.
- cultofmetatron 6y ago
  omg... if you use it sigificatly (ie: every day) you might as well buy a physical mac mini and keep it at home. it'll pay for itself in a month!

banana_giraffe 6y ago

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.

xyst 6y ago
It's probably very expensive, or maybe they haven't updated the aws landing page yet.
- baggy_trough 6y ago
  It’s about $1 per hour.
  - monsieurbanana 6y ago
    Please tell me this is a typo, and you actually meant $1/day.
    - detaro 6y ago
      not a typo. $1/day would be extremely cheap.
    - baggy_trough 6y ago
      Afraid not, but you can get much better pricing at MacStadium.
      - twistedpair 6y ago
        Does that include their Mac Cloud offering with custom networking/subnets, or the per Mac Mini rentals? Generally the cloud services (similar to AWS) are pricier.
banana_giraffe 6y ago

offtop5 6y ago

Awesome. I'll still keep a Mac mini since I like Logic, but this is very very good for say a Unity or Flutter developer who needs to deploy apps to iOS

filleduchaos 6y ago
Cloud services to build/deploy for iOS already exist and are nowhere near this over-the-top expensive so no, I don't think cross-platform devs are the target market here.

ianmobbs 6y ago

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

ackbar03 6y ago
This seems super hacky though
- detaro 6y ago
  not to mention expensive.
  - SulfurHexaFluri 6y ago
    $24/day for imessage.. Much much cheaper to just buy a second hand mac mini and leave it plugged in to your router.
easton 6y ago
One Mac (serial number) per instance, so you probably couldn’t host iMessage or other access to Apple Services without getting burned after a couple days (and AWS wouldn’t want you doing it and getting a whole rack of Minis banned from iCloud or something).
thinkingemote 6y ago
running servers (or anything personal) on these instances are forbidden.

tootie 6y ago

"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?

etaioinshrdlu 6y ago
Kind of hilarious. This is barely cloud computing compared to the rest of ec2, which has per-second billing...
- wyldfire 6y ago
  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.
  - dheera 6y ago
    You can also run a MacOS VM in VirtualBox on Ubuntu. No Apple hardware needed. https://github.com/myspaghetti/macos-virtualbox https://github.com/myspaghetti/macos-virtualbox
    - untog 6y ago
      It's against Apple's T&Cs, though. If you're doing it at home by yourself, who cares. But a company that's interested in automated testing etc. isn't going to see it as an answer.
      - dheera 6y ago
        Get an old old old Mac pro from ages ago. Upgrade its motherboard. Then upgrade its RAM. Then upgrade its hard drive. Then upgrade its power supply. It will still be an "Apple-branded computer" because of its case. It will just have received a bunch of upgrades. Big "haha" to them. (Or if you're actually a corporation just buy a Mac.)

mxie-ca 6y ago

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

KingMachiavelli 6y ago

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.

hjuutilainen 6y ago
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-vindication https://blog.macstadium.com/blog/developers-big-sur-and-vind...
- yborg 6y ago
  And now we know the real reason for those changes.
samtheprogram 6y ago
> 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.
moonchild 6y ago
That's a minimum of 24 hours, not a maximum. As the sibling says, this is condition of apple's EULA.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

nicodjimenez 6y ago

This will be huge long term for enabling cloud AI to automate human tasks when interacting with a computer.

cercatrova 6y ago
What does this mean? This sentence is so vague as to be meaningless.
- joana035 6y ago
  GPT3 maybe?

ThinkBeat 6y ago

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 for N amount of time? I am sure other cloud providers will want their own Mac "servers" now.

shiftpgdn 6y ago
Rentable Mac Mini (or Mac colo of all flavors) has been a thing for easily 15+ years. https://www.macstadium.com/ 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.
- philliphaydon 6y ago
  AWS probably would have had them sooner if it wasn’t for the t&c...
easton 6y ago
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.
barkingcat 6y ago
"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.

xyst 6y ago

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.

techscruggs 6y ago
At Amazon's scale, betting on M1 servers for a niche subset of their EC2 offering doesn't seem to be really risky.
novok 6y ago
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
detaro 6y ago
I doubt this is a play at M1 servers. M1 servers on Apple hardware is not what AWS wants people to use when the alternative is other AWS servers. Only for running macOS there isn't an alternative.
- dash2 6y ago
  AWS’s value proposition isn’t the hardware. Why wouldn’t they use M1 if it’s best for their customers?
  - detaro 6y ago
    Because they'd much rather use their own high-density server designs instead of dealing with Macs that really aren't made for datacenters, and M1 has no clear must-have benefit over those justifying that effort outside of the macOS use case. Now if Apple were to selling/license M1 chips to them, that might be different, but there is no indication that's going to happen in any way, and then the current work based on Macs wouldn't really be preparation for it.

tekacs 6y ago

It seems like this directly ties back to Apple’s recent policy changes [0]. The details line up exactly, including: - You must rent them for at least 24 hours at a time. - You must rent out one machine per end user. I just feel sorry for all the smaller providers who have done this for years. I wonder if this was Apple’s update prompting AWS, or AWS pushing Apple to make the change — or both. [0]: https://blog.macstadium.com/blog/developers-big-sur-and-vindication https://blog.macstadium.com/blog/developers-big-sur-and-vind...

fomine3 6y ago
The author defends Apple's decision to clarify EURA but it looks like get worse for developers.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  The author defends it because it helps them and hurts everyone else.
nanagojo 6y ago
Azure piplines has had the ability for quite a while to use macos agents...
- tobylane 6y ago
  GitHub Actions, which is mostly a copy of Pipelines, has Big Sur while Pipelines doesn’t. Someone points out Circle let’s you ssh in, while afaik GHA and Pipelines don’t. Is this a key difference?
  - oefrha 6y ago
    > Someone points out Circle let’s you ssh in, while afaik GHA and Pipelines don’t That's mostly a convenience feature, you can ssh into GH Actions' macOS instances through something like an ngrok tunnel, or run a terminal sharing tool within to basically do the same. See for instance https://github.com/fastai/fastmac https://github.com/fastai/fastmac. I doubt that's a key difference.

nnx 6y ago

Given how M1 is technically impressive (not only CPU but also for Neural Engine), one can dream Apple will resurrect XServe with multi-socket later versions of their silicon. This kind of performance with this kind of power efficiency would be game changer in data center. Looking forward to Graviton3 as well.

easton 6y ago

Interesting that they’ve mentioned M1 support. That makes me wonder if VMWare is going to get together with Apple and make a ESXi port to Apple Silicon, as the Mac Mini and Mac Pro were long standing on the HWL since they were the only rackable devices on the market legally allowed to virtualize macOS. I’m fairly certain that Apple used it internally for testing. (AWS will probably at least attempt a port of their Nitro hypervisor to M1 as well, since it’d make the machines infinitely easier to manage at scale since Macs no longer have a NetBoot or Internet Recovery option).

floatboth 6y ago
AWS does not use netboot, EBS volumes appear as local NVMe drives because their custom Nitro PCIe cards handle that. In the Mac case, they connect the cards using Thunderbolt. The Mac instances will NOT use an AWS provided hypervisor until Apple's terms change. Currently the hosting provider is only allowed to lease the whole machine, only the end user can do virtualization.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

tus88 6y ago

wut

awinter-py 6y ago

how does this affect companies like buddybuild that offer CI/CD for ios? has it commoditized them, or does it give them a lower cost way to run their cluster?

appwiz 6y ago
Apple acquired buddybuild in 2018 (https://www.buddybuild.com/blog/buddybuild-is-now-part-of-apple https://www.buddybuild.com/blog/buddybuild-is-now-part-of-ap...). For CI/CD providers, it depends on how they offer the underlying macOS environment. If they target enterprise workloads that have stringent compliance needs, then this offering is a net benefit especially if the enterprise is already on AWS. The cost isn't cheap but there are many ways to price it as a value added provider.

dash2 6y ago

This seems a bit half-baked and niche at the moment. You have to rent a whole machine for 24 hours, which is expensive and prevents on-demand scaling. I wonder if Apple and Amazon are just dipping their toes in to prepare for a deeper collaboration in future.

howlgarnish 6y ago
Given the pricing of these instances ($24/day with a 1 day minimum), nobody's going to be deploying their autoscaled k8s clusters on these anytime soon.
detaro 6y ago
I'd take the fact that the 24h restriction from Apple's licensing hasn't been removed as a sign that there isn't much collaboration going on. Apple granting an exception from that would seem like a no-brainer if they wanted to support a partner offering this.

madrox 6y ago

This seems 100% about building in XCode, which leaves me wondering why it's being offered as an EC2 instance instead of some higher order build tool. Is there a use case I'm missing?

howlgarnish 6y ago
Software compatibility testing is a big one, particularly if/when it's easy to spin up Mac instances with various OS versions installed.

dfabulich 6y ago

Amazon lists the price of mac1 instances (running on rack-mounted Intel Mac Minis) at $1.083 per hour, $9,487 per year. You have to pay for 24 hours up front, after which they bill by the second. https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/dedicated-hosts/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/dedicated-hosts/pricing/ They don't yet display any reservation pricing for mac1 instances, but they do offer a "savings plan." https://aws.amazon.com/savingsplans/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/savingsplans/pricing/ If you pay for three years up front, you can pay $0.764 per hour, $6,692 per year, 29% off. I believe that's the lowest price Amazon will offer you. For comparison, you can rent an equivalent Mac Mini from MacStadium for $139/month, $1,668/year. Or you can rent their cheapest model for $59/month, $708/year. You can also buy the equivalent Mac Mini for $1,899.

gogopuppygogo 6y ago
Don’t forget the bandwidth premium you pay at Amazon AWS. Paying these premiums is all in the furtherance of a good cause called “Bezos getting another hundy billion to his name”.
- zelly 6y ago
  Build your own AWS
  - rualca 6y ago
    Plenty of cloud providers don't charge for bandwidth until you hit an anti-abuse ceiling. For example, Hetzner offers a 20TB bandwidth cap per node. You don't need to buy AWS to get same prices on network.
    - chx 6y ago
      Hetzner dedicated servers (which start below 30 EUR mind you) do not have bandwidth caps for two years now. https://www.hetzner.com/news/traffic-limit/ https://www.hetzner.com/news/traffic-limit/

devops1997 6y ago

How can this be viable cost wise. With their minimum billing of $1.083 an hour, and a minimum of 24 hour billing, unless you want this for a short time only, these costs are way too high. macstasium.com has much lower costs for this.

saagarjha 6y ago

An interesting offering from Amazon that is crippled by Apple and MacStadium, who deserve to be raked over the coals for their recent EULA changes. Just read the post on MacStadium's blog: https://blog.macstadium.com/blog/developers-big-sur-and-vindication https://blog.macstadium.com/blog/developers-big-sur-and-vind... Under the new agreement, you must: * Rent to only one organization * Rent for 24 hours at the minimum * Use it for some set of "approved" development work …among other restrictions. And Brian Stucki is celebrating these changes?! This is a sick joke. You're enjoying a significantly tightened EULA that benefits nobody but yourself, a EULA that means that a single CI build now costs $26 on AWS instead of 50 cents; one that means that more than half the comments here are confused why AWS is ripping people off. Shame on you Brian Stucki, shame on you MacStadium, and shame on you Apple. Your EULA changes are absurdly hostile to developers, since now they're either going to have to buy Macs themselves or rent from MacStadium-like services. Shame on you both for colluding together for making this situation horrible and then having the guts to write that blog post. I can't believe I'm saying this, but Amazon, I feel so sorry for you. You didn't deserve this.

pjmlp 6y ago
Maybe those companies should focus their business in countries where EULAs have zero legal value, like EU countries.
- jraph 6y ago
  Though some of their statements probably don't apply, I think EULAs apply in EU. Software license do apply. Software patents are still not recognized, let's hope this continues for a long time.
  - punnerud 6y ago
    EULA apply, but there is legislations in EU that make terms prohibiting you from reverse engineer, sell, rent or automating null and void.
    - 6y ago

cameldrv 6y ago

Remarkably expensive -- $9400/yr for a $700 computer.

jbverschoor 6y ago
Seems about the same ratio aws uses for most things

yarcob 6y ago

At a first glance this sounds exciting: We use a lot of different versions of macOS and Xcode for building our apps. We have one dedicated Mac, and about 5 VMs on a second Mac that we use for building our software. Keeping everything up to date is a pain. So if we could just rent Mac VMs that would be nice. But this is pretty much useless. You get only a single machine for a really high price. Theoretically I could run VMWare on the rented machine, to run multiple virtual copies of macOS, but then I'd be doing all the maintenance that I don't want to do.

cowsandmilk 6y ago
I’ll be interested in how long they keep OS versions. This would be really compelling for me if I could run 10.11+ rather than just 10.14 and 10.15.

withinrafael 6y ago

GitHub has been doling out tiny macOS runners in virtual machines for a bit now [1] (seemingly in violation of macOS SLA), and these were hosted on MacStadium [2]! So for MacStadium to come out and pretend they were following the rules the entire time is disappointing. [1] http://web.archive.org/web/20200511183317if_/https://github.com/actions/virtual-environments/issues/835#issuecomment-625619583 http://web.archive.org/web/20200511183317if_/https://github.... [2] http://web.archive.org/web/20201108115438/https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team@latest/actions/reference/specifications-for-github-hosted-runners http://web.archive.org/web/20201108115438/https://docs.githu...

BillinghamJ 6y ago
They would have been VMing on top of the machine provided by MacStadium.
philo23 6y ago
As weird as it is, I think as long as they provide an entire physical Mac you’re free to run as many macOS virtual hosts on it yourself as you want to. At least that’s my understanding of the EULA explained in the MacStadium blog post.
- BillinghamJ 6y ago
  Yeah I think the issue here is more likely GitHub not following the EULA
floatboth 6y ago
CI runners are kinda different than VM hosting. I mean sure you could abuse them to run sshd and interactively use them for a while :D but the service as intended is that you don't "rent" the VM in any meaningful way, it's fully theirs, they just run your one single job on it and show you the logs.
- withinrafael 6y ago
  Prior to Big Sur, it's my understanding the macOS SLA explicitly disallowed this. Snippet: > Except as otherwise permitted by the terms of this License or otherwise licensed by Apple: (i) only one user may use the Apple Software at a time, and (ii) you may not make the Apple Software available over a network where it could be run or used by multiple computers at the same time. You may not rent, lease, lend, sell, redistribute or sublicense the Apple Software.

deleted 6y ago

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wewake 6y ago

Boycott Apple completely. How did we go from open development to some overpriced, only half decent and walled mess that's now worth $2 trillion? Shame.

lotsofpulp 6y ago
Because that’s the solution that resulted in my parents not suffering from malware and various toolbars in their browsers. There is no way they or a significant portion of the population was going to learn how to discern good programs from bad, and a walled garden is apparently the option that works.
hacker_newz 6y ago
How do you build iOS apps without Apple?

tipsandtricks 6y ago

https://www.techotn.com/top-5-hdmi-2-1-monitors/ https://www.techotn.com/top-5-hdmi-2-1-monitors/ the next level monitors for gaming

thinkingemote 6y ago

You cannot use these as servers. You can only use this for: "Permitted Developer services." This is defined as "continuous integration services, including but not limited to software development, building software from source, automated testing during software development, and running necessary developer tools to support such activities." (from: https://blog.macstadium.com/blog/developers-big-sur-and-vindication https://blog.macstadium.com/blog/developers-big-sur-and-vind... ) So, no servers and no hosting stuff, and no personal use of desktop applications like Photoshop etc

denysvitali 6y ago
Well, you can always develop a Photoshop plugin and test it in a very intensive way. Still not worth the price though

gregorymfoster 6y ago

I’m working on https://screenplay.dev https://screenplay.dev, where test every change against a battery of open source iOS apps (Wikipedia, signal, etc). We started on GitHub actions, but found it much cheaper to buys ~4 Mac mini’s and run them in the office. It takes a little love to keep them up to date and stable (maybe an hour a week), but in return we get cheap, debuggable Mac computer. I like that more offerings are appearing, but at this price, we’ll stick to our furnace of Mac mini’s for now.

ftio 6y ago

Someone commented on a previous thread that the M1 Mac mini hadn't changed form factors despite a reduction in component size, lamenting that it had retained the same size and shape as its on-Intel predecessors. This is the reason. Datacenter customers (really, any customers racking minis) likely represent a meaningful share of Mac mini sales. Changing the form factor would mean these high-value customers would need to re-tool their racks to support a new design. Even Apple is not immune to the pressure of large customers.

kevincox 6y ago

I find it disgusting that Apple can force people to jump though these hoops while paying them a huge premium for sub-standard hardware[1] so that these people can develop for their platform. Not only are they bleeding the developers at build, test and sale time. They are providing a shitty experience while doing it. Of course from an economic point of view they are right! For businesses it still makes sense to do this most of the time (especially since webapps are crippled on iOS) due to the large user base. If they didn't have that user base I'd bet very few people would tolerate this crap. This is one of the handful of reasons that I boycott Apple, I find their business practices morally unacceptable. [1] Sub-standard for CI/server use cases.

jtdev 6y ago
How are web apps crippled on iOS?
- snazz 6y ago
  MobileSafari doesn't support a number of "PWA" features that Android Chrome does. Push notifications, for example, always require a mobile app on iOS (which I think is a good thing, personally, but I can understand other perspectives).
  - kevincox 6y ago
    It is behind a permission so it isn't that any website can just start sending you notifications. (Although personally I'm not a fan of phone notifications either)
- jleach82 6y ago
  Safari support (and even chrome, FF on macs) is horrible. They've become the new IE in terms of typical web programming that works everywhere except that platform. In the past year, every browser-based support issue we've had to deal with across multiple projects is due to Safari not handling things the way the rest of the browsers do. Worse, there's issues that are specific to Apple devices (iPad rendering of certain CSS, works everywhere else, including Mac's own emulators, but renders fubar on the actual iPad), leaving the debugging/fixing process a trial and error issue. It's horrible. And even worse, this can't be debugged on anything but a Mac anymore, so if you don't use Mac as your primary dev platform, you're near-screwed when it comes to trying to resolve web app issues that only arise on their platform. Then there's mobile app management, which is just as bad in it's own way. We had an app on the App Store for three years, then all of a sudden during one minor maintenance update they decided it wasn't allowed on the store any more and immediately pulled it. Thousands of business users affected, and two months to get the app propped back up on a custom business distribution channel, thousands of dollars worth of process re-development, etc. Apple is the absolute worst platform for business-productivity programming. They screw the developers with a far stiffer rod than any other company has ever done.

gumby 6y ago

I assume better terms will be available for Mac and iOS instances available in some future Apple cloud offering.

Shorel 6y ago

Wanted to try one. Then I saw the price...

ryanmarsh 6y ago

Lots of folks in this thread seem to be unaware that other companies offer Mac mini hosting, at less than one tenth the cost. If you don’t need the full AWS ecosystem for your workload it’s worth doing some research.

davidonhacker 6y ago

If you only need CI Azure DevOps has hosted MacOS build agents

hacknat 6y ago

So could I spin one up for 24 hours, then simply power it off and pay by the second thereafter (every time I turn it back on)?

whoisjohnkid 6y ago
Huh, great question; I’m curious about this myself. If it works that way then it would def be a lot less pricey.

deleted 6y ago

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bochoh 6y ago

The thing I still don't understand with Mac, even if you were to virtualize it, is that VNC is abysmal compared to RDP from Microsoft. How are people actually /using/ this hardware (short of command line x-code builds)?

paulfurtado 6y ago

I wonder if these can easily run linux AMIs. Since OSX doesn't have native containerization, our CI system for mac builds runs linux on mac minis and runs osx VMs inside of linux since you're allowed to run osx vms on linux if linux is running on mac hardware. So in an ideal world, we'd run our own linux AMI on the baremetal mac instances and run OSX in VMs. I'm sure it's possible of course, but I wonder how painful it would be to setup. Fighting EFI/secureboot? Some other bootloader?

WhyNotHugo 6y ago

I bought a Mac mini for iOS development and gee am I regretting it. Especially this these devices cannot be booted unattended - if it ever powers off, I need to: take it out of the closet, plug it in my desktop, turn off file encryption, put it back in the closet, boot it, VNC in, and finally turn on file encryption again