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How AWS Added Apple Mac Mini Nodes to EC2

196 points by tambourine_man 6y ago

KptMarchewa 6y ago
I just don't understand why Apple won't offer their own cloud offerings or just straightforward partner with some public clouds and offer servers more suitable for developers than forcing people to use desktops as servers.
- throwaway4good 6y ago
  Makes you wonder what kind of hardware Apple is using for all their own cloud services (web, mail, messaging, icloud etc.).
  - vondur 6y ago
    Don’t they use AWS like everyone else?
    - kortilla 6y ago
      Big tech companies with large bandwidth requirements don’t use AWS. Netflix doesn’t use AWS for video, Facebook doesn’t use AWS for most stuff, Google and Microsoft obviously don’t now because of competition but they didn’t before GCP and Azure were things.
    - ogre_codes 6y ago
      They used to rely heavily on AWS and Azure, but they've moved a lot in-house now.
      - Crash0v3rid3 6y ago
        Apple has been using GCP and AWS for years. My understanding was they ditched Azure.
  - ruffrey 6y ago
    Apple has a self host cloud division as well as AWS according to news reports. Unclear if they run on Linux but it seems likely they must, even a bit if using AWS. Theoretically they could probably upload custom AMIs with macOS.
    - sl1ck731 6y ago
      I don't believe its possible to get macOS (or atleast wasn't) onto an AMI in anyway.
      - rescbr 6y ago
        I'd say it is possible to run Darwin on AWS, but I have never tried. FreeBSD runs well, so we know that any OS with drivers will boot on AWS. They're Apple after all, so they can build macOS to boot from a standard environment - UEFI, kernel that doesn't check the copy prevention string on SMBIOS, etc. Us, mere mortals, are more restricted, as we don't have the keys of the kingdom.
    - Crash0v3rid3 6y ago
      Apple uses GCP as well as AWS.
  - IST-Throwaway 6y ago
    When I was there, a variety of brands of hardware, mostly running RHEL. In fact running OS-X in datacenters was verboten, and eventually limited to a couple of small racks running on their own network segments where you could put in a mac pro if desperately needed to.
    - wayne 6y ago
      Somewhat surprising since unlike their customers, there's no license restriction to Apple running macOS on different hardware. Maybe they didn't want to maintain a separate fork only for internal use. And having their own OS makes it more challenging to port apps to AWS/Azure.
      - watermelon0 6y ago
        The real question is how would this be beneficial to them? Almost everyone runs production systems on either Linux or Windows, so they would be an outlier, and the only one debugging and contributing to the operating system/libraries/etc. I've read before on HN about people using Mac hardware in production, when they needed access to macOS graphics API, but since this only concerns a software implementation, and hardware was standard until M1 processors, it's reasonable to assume that Apple could port that part of OS to Linux, if they needed to use it from servers.
    - throwaway4good 6y ago
      "Running OS-X in datacenters was verboten" Why?
      - cma 6y ago
        Maybe they didn't want to run into a tech debt thing of "we can't push this update to consumers even though it would cause no issues for them, because it would break X and Y on our backend servers and the two would have to diverge for some time until we come up with a fix."
      - toast0 6y ago
        I'm not an Apple insider, but I can imagine many reasons. For one thing, the tcp stack is ancient, and easy to syn flood. (It was forked from FreeBSD in 2001ish, before FreeBSD added syncookies and syncache). Synflooding os x makes the whole network stack unresponsive, including other interfaces like localhost.
  - kevincox 6y ago
    I'm really curious what they use for their CI. Do they compile all of their iOS apps on Apple hardware? Or do they get the luxury of using proper server hardware and software?
    - saagarjha 6y ago
      Lots of Mac Pros, some virtual machines.
- notRobot 6y ago
  Because Apple really doesn't care about anything to do with developers. It's too tiny a percentage of their user base.
  - api 6y ago
    It's a large part of their Mac user base. That being said, I don't think Apple has enough people who would be interested in hosting on MacOS to justify an Apple cloud offering. I think they know that.
    - notRobot 6y ago
      > It's a large part of their Mac user base. Is it really? Lots of devs use Macs, yes. But compared to the sheer number of regular, non-dev users, that has to be tiiiiny. I found lots of stats on the internet about what percentage of developers use Macs, but none about how just many Mac users are developers, so it'd be fascinating to see that number of anyone can find it.
      - ogre_codes 6y ago
        It's not about the percentage of users. Developers fuel their platform. Without developers MacOS and iOS are nothing. Apple knows this.
        oblio 6y ago
        They definitely care about devs less than Microsoft. They know that they have a relatively captive rich user base and devs will kowtow to them in order to develop stuff they can sell to that user base. That's the real target. And you can see it by how they treat the development tools (stuff like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25563276 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25563276 or the many deprecations, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25562604 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25562604). Or CI/CD setups using their tools.
        6y ago
- emeraldd 6y ago
  I suspect they don't believe there is a market for them or at least not enough of a market to justify the development expense. I know they've tried producing a "server" in the past and even a server version of their operating system, but it didn't seem to go anywhere. Unless they had a way to meaningfully compete with Windows and Linux (really, linux) the only viable market I can see is for build systems, and that's pretty niche.
  - 908B64B197 6y ago
    With Servers you have to maintain a good supply chain and deal with institutional buyers. It's almost a parallels business to the rest of their offering. They won't get support at the genius bar... Server OS seemed to be targeted at small businesses to run on a Mac Pro or Mac Mini connected to NAS and hosting internal applications. But it wasn't very different from regular OSX.
- jrwoodruff 6y ago
  They tried, but it's just not their DNA. Apple isn't a B2B enterprise company, they're a B2C consumer company that, as a side effect of their consumer success, ended up with a decent number of devices in enterprises. But they know they can't, and don't want to try, to win against the big entrenched enterprise players. https://www.zdnet.com/article/why-apple-had-to-kill-the-xserve/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/why-apple-had-to-kill-the-xser...
  - secabeen 6y ago
    Yeah, they certainly don't have the right DNA on the hardware side. On the software side, they've been working a lot more closely with JAMF recently, and there's quite a bit of enterprise support in the MDM space there.
    - mintone 6y ago
      Can confirm with this, when we approached Apple on MDM they all but opened an account for us with JAMF.
    - mrpippy 6y ago
      They also bought Fleetsmith recently
    - lostlogin 6y ago
      Apple Remote Desktop is a pretty neglected app but it’s fantastically good. It’s got so many features that make remote administration so very good.
  - ketamine__ 6y ago
    Am I wrong to think there are workloads that can only be run on Mac? Seems like a competitive advantage.
    - Macha 6y ago
      The only workloads that can only be run on a mac are those which are Apple specific, such as building/testing iOS apps.
- jedberg 6y ago
  One of the rules on these Macs in AWS is that you have to rent them for a minimum of 24 hours at a time and you have to rent the whole machine. I think they don't want to cannibalize Mac sales. If you want to make an iPhone app, you have to buy a Mac to do it. They don't want to make it easy for you to rent one just to compile the app.
  - jjeaff 6y ago
    That's the only reason I need them, to compile a binary and submit it. But can apple dictate licensing terms like this? If aws buys a mac, can't they use it however they like? Or are there terms limiting this in the purchase agreement.
    - kayodelycaon 6y ago
      Can Microsoft dictate the terms under which you can use their software? Some companies only charge for commercial use of their products. So the “it’s free” argument doesn’t really hold water.
      - scarface74 6y ago
        Yes. Software companies dictate whether their software has to be run on a dedicate host, the allowed number of cores, etc. all of the time. Companies have tried to “rent DVDs” digitally by playing the DVD on their hardware and streaming it. It got shot down by the courts.
    - est31 6y ago
      I agree that what you want to do should be possible and cheap, but generally if you build something for a platform you'd also want to test it on that platform, no? What you say implies that you compile the binary and don't test it before submitting?
      - lukeramsden 6y ago
        Automated testing should be done at CI stage, and you can submit a binary to Apple without having to send it live on the AppStore (TestFlight is for that), or you could send it to other beta distribution channels
- ksec 6y ago
  Well there will be a ARM Mac Pro, so hopefully that will be rack mountable. And any Cloud customer can have it hosted. I do wish they have less restriction on macOS usage timing. And a services for Web Developers to test their site on Safari. Which is currently impossible to do with buying a Mac.
  - theobeers 6y ago
    It seems to me that the licensing situation—you have to lease a whole machine for a minimum period of 24 hours—will make the Mac Pro a poor choice in most contexts. The Mac Mini at or near its base configuration may remain the most sensible option.
    - skohan 6y ago
      It would be kind of crazy to imagine, if the M-series processor for the Mac Pro is among the best performing CPUs in the world - which it may turn out to be - that these processors would be virtually inaccessible in the server space in any relevant way. It seems like something which should not result from a free market. I wonder how "usage" is defined here: for instance, if I run a managed service on a fleet of Macs in the cloud, which serves many end customers from each machine, is this allowed under the terms?
      - ghaff 6y ago
        >if I run a managed service on a fleet of Macs in the cloud, which serves many end customers from each machine, is this allowed under the terms? IANAL (and haven't read the full EULA) but probably. The 24 hour restriction seems to apply to leasing. I would assume that running a multi-tenant managed service (or, for that matter, serving web pages) from a Mac would not be seen as leasing.
    - JoshTriplett 6y ago
      > It seems to me that the licensing situation—you have to lease a whole machine for a minimum period of 24 hours—will make the Mac Pro a poor choice in most contexts Not necessarily. A Mac Pro would work well for single-tenant usage where you want to run a series of applications that can each burst to the whole machine but not take long to finish.
- jbverschoor 6y ago
  They will...
- rnantes 6y ago
  I could see Apple come out with their own in-house Cloud Computing platform within the next 2 years. - They would be vertically integrated with Apple Silicon - Apple themselves are increasingly depending on cloud services - Async/Await in Swift will likely land next year, making Server-Side Swift much more appealing - Apple is greatly increasing cloud / Kubernetes hires - Could share a single Apple Silicon ARM architecture from client(ios) to dev(mac) to cloud
  - madeofpalk 6y ago
    I’m dubious. The only way I could see this happening is if it was some companion platform for iCloud/iOS apps. I just don’t understand what anyone has to gain from Apple making an “open” cloud platform.
  - DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
    > I could see Apple come out with their own in-house Cloud Computing platform within the next 2 years. Apple, as a company, does not "do" long-term support; they're the anti-Microsoft when it comes to backwards compatibility. As soon as you start being an infrastructure service provider that means you HAVE to offer an LTSB branch of your OS, and Apple does not want to do that (and macOS has stagnated a lot since Apple devoted most of their OS engineering efforts to iOS). Apple doesn't offer a "real" server OS SKU at all (the "macOS Server" app package is for SOHO management, not for use as a high-availability application server OS). ...which means that Apple would have to provide an offering using Linux or BSD - such as a "naked" Darwin distro - but again, Apple does not want to have to support that, and I'm sure devs don't want to see the IaaS OS scene fragment further, and Darwin is far, far removed from being yet another Linux distro. Amazon offers ARM cloud systems - why should Apple risk their profitability by competing in an arena that doesn't pose any risk to their bottom-line? And what do they have to gain?
    - e40 6y ago
      This is the fly in the oinment. I would love to see Apple have an LTS branch of macOS, but I just don't see this happening. Too much would need to change in the company for that to happen. From a macOS developer's standpoint, it's really a huge PITA there is no LTS. But, we adjust. Because we have a low-level product (compiler), we sometimes get into a situation where we need to sunset a product before we would normally do that, just because the older product doesn't run on the supported macOS versions. Doesn't happen often, but it does happen.
- AlphaSite 6y ago
  I think with their recent hiring spree for core K8s contributors and another factor they may well do. It’s something they’ve dipped their toes into in the past for iCloud services. If I remember correctly they previously bundled icloud services where each user got a slice of storage on the cloud, so I could see them extending that model to a time slice of compute as well, hosted on some form of K8s. I think the previous model was too limited for most use cases, but it’s not fundamentally broken. I don’t think the economics of the M1 with 32+ cores make sense unless they go down the route of either build a cloud platform and amortise the cost of the chip design over a larger number of devices (or a chip let approach, but I’m not sure this matches their general design approach). Also I’m pretty sure they think they have a competitive advantage over traditional x86 and ARM vendors so they’ll likely want to strike while that still holds.
  - kbenson 6y ago
    > If I remember correctly they previously bundled icloud services where each user got a slice of storage on the cloud, so I could see them extending that model to a time slice of compute as well, hosted on some form of K8s. I think the previous model was too limited for most use cases, but it’s not fundamentally broken. The average Apple consumer customer can make plenty of use of cloud storage. What use does the average user have for cloud compute resources? Unless Apple starts offloading some processing to the cloud, and gives them some free, I'm not sure how regular users would use this, and offering it for free assuming the majority of people won't use it is just asking for some popular app to come along that takes advantage of that and screws up the economics. Not to mention people probably won't be happy to have a limit and pay for overage use for stuff that is likely provided by free on other platforms (if Google Photos prettifies your photos for free and Apple does it through metered compute with some given free, that's bad optics).
    - crooked-v 6y ago
      Also, Apple has quite a lot of effort into specifically running things locally rather than in the cloud. For example, Photos.app does all its facial recognition and 'Memory' creation locally.
    - 6y ago
- bradknowles 6y ago
  Apple had rack-mount servers. They got rid of them. I don’t know the exact reasons why, but I assume it’s because there weren’t enough people buying them and they couldn’t make enough profit on building and supporting them. I did find it interesting that Apple took the entire last run of that hardware for themselves, so that they could run their own internal VMware clusters on real Apple hardware for their developers. There’s no way that Apple could build an AMI to run on hardware designed and built by someone else. Apple has a small number of people who really know what they’re doing, and they get shifted around to whatever project Apple thinks is most important — whether that’s hardware or software. Apple needs to own the whole enchilada here, for multiple reasons. So, they can sell Apple hardware to AWS for inclusion inside of AWS data centers. But it has to be real-deal Apple hardware, running real-deal Apple OS, even if it is under a hyper visor like VMWare.
ogre_codes 6y ago
Considering how much Apple has been helping MacStadium and the volume of Mac minis going to rack based installs, I'm surprised Apple hasn't made them a little more rack mount friendly. Seems like they could just make a special case-less sled with only minor tweaks to the existing mini design. Obviously they would need to build a sled/ server chassis too with networking and power delivery.
- wil421 6y ago
  It sounds like upper management said no to the server market years ago and doesn’t want to sell a “server”. But they’ll happily sell you a Mac mini to build a server farm.
  - rualca 6y ago
    Arguably, mac minis are servers that can be repurposed as desktops. Even in their marketing blurbs Apple advertises mac minis as build and render farms.
  - shagie 6y ago
    The Mac mini isn't intended for that type of use... they do make a rack mount Mac Pro ( https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-pro/rack https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-pro/rack ). Give it a generation to get to the M series chips.
    - ogre_codes 6y ago
      > The Mac mini isn't intended for that type of use The mini absolutely is intended for use as a server. It's what Apple provided to Mac Stadium for OSS projects to build on. Very few Mac Pros are used for CI servers, they are mostly used for video and audio processing.
- ftio 6y ago
  All the big players who rack Mac Minis already have custom rack equipment that fits Mac Minis of this form factor. I suspect the design hasn’t changed at all primarily for this reason.
jjeaff 6y ago
Is there some licensing issue with Apple that requires this minimum monthly usage? It appears aws is charging $1/hr with a 24 hr minimum which is similar to every other provider out there that is offering MacOS instances. I was excited to see that AWS was offering these as I assumed it would be priced just like everything else - hourly with no minimums. I literally need access a few hrs a month for submitting binary updates to the app store. And I suspect there are a lot of other users with this same use case which may explain the consistent policy of minimum monthly usage.
- wmf 6y ago
  Yes, Apple requires a 24-hour minimum.
- whoknew1122 6y ago
  Yes. It's licensing.
  - jjeaff 6y ago
    So when I buy a mac mini at Best Buy, am I somehow agreeing to that policy?
    - Macha 6y ago
      When you click accept in the initial setup that has a link to T&Cs that informs you can return it for a refund if you don't agree. How legally enforceable clickwrap such as that is varies from country to country.
- epmaybe 6y ago
  How do you test the updates without a Mac? Sorry I’m sure I’m missing something
- seanwilson 6y ago
  > It appears aws is charging $1/hr with a 24 hr minimum which is similar to every other provider out there that is offering MacOS instances. How much per month? Around $720?
jasoneckert 6y ago
Given that these are x86_64 Mac Minis, I'm surprised that Apple and Amazon couldn't work out a virtualization agreement that would allow Amazon to run macOS on their existing hypervisors. Higher education has been trying to do that with Apple for a decade now, but they don't have Amazon's clout.
- bhawks 6y ago
  Apple is adamantly opposed to allowing this use case. It doesn't matter who is asking them.
  - lloeki 6y ago
    Ever since Lion(? IIRC when the license terms changed) there was nothing preventing a hypervisor to run on bare Apple metal and host macOS in VMs; in fact a frequently used one is VMware ESXi/Vsphere. It just seems that the market isn't there and people just go for full-machine MacStadium rental or use their own hardware.
    - comex 6y ago
      As of Big Sur [1], the license explicitly requires providers to rent out an entire machine at a time. [1] https://9to5mac.com/2020/11/11/macos-big-sur-adds-leasing-terms-that-pull-hosting-services-like-macstadium-out-of-a-legal-gray-area/ https://9to5mac.com/2020/11/11/macos-big-sur-adds-leasing-te...
      - lloeki 6y ago
        Indeed. Also, the "purposes" of Section 3 explicitly lists CI as "(B)", followed (confusingly) by "B.". > For purposes of this Section 3: (A) End User Lessee means a Lessee who is the end user ultimately using the leased Apple Software solely for Permitted Developer Services; and (B) Permitted Developer Services means 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. Each Lessor must provide Apple with advance notice prior to leasing or subleasing the Apple Software pursuant to this Section 3 by contacting Apple Developer Relations (https://developer.apple.com/contact/macos-license/ https://developer.apple.com/contact/macos-license/). > B. Subleasing. A Lessee may further sublease the Apple Software pursuant to this Section 3 provided that such Lessee complies with all of the terms of this Section 3. A Lessee subleasing the Apple Software (who shall also be considered a Lessor under this Section 3) must fully relinquish exclusive use and control of the Apple Software and the Apple-branded hardware on which it is installed to its Lessee during the lease period. From which I understand that e.g 1. MacStadium is a "Lessor", 2. GitHub is a "Lessee" that does subleasing and has to lease for 24h minimum, and 3. a GitHub Actions user is a "End User Lessee" but could lease for fractions of 24h. Strangely this means that GH cannot provide macOS on its own! Also, this seems to mean that GH has to provide bare metal to its users, not VMs ("must fully relinquish exclusive use and control of the Apple Software and the Apple-branded hardware"), which is too bad given what you can do with VMs[0]. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25568613 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25568613
amelius 6y ago
Does this mean we can finally compile for the Apple platform without owning an Apple computer?
- stingraycharles 6y ago
  Yes but there’s a minimum rent period of 24h, which means you’ll lose the benefits of a cloud provider over an on-premise OSX “build box”.
  - amelius 6y ago
    Strange, Apple should be subsidizing compilation for Apple's platform instead.
    - kevincox 6y ago
      That moves less hardware. If they actually wanted to make it easy to develop software they would allow compiling on other platforms, and ideally provide a VM to test on. This is why I support IE and Edge on personal sites but not Safari. You can download free VMs from Microsoft for web testing, but you have to pay Apple to make things work on their platform.
- ratww 6y ago
  You could already do it using CIs like BitRise, Circle or even GH Actions. CIs are probably cheaper due to the AWS 24h minimum.
  - scarface74 6y ago
    Also, MS offered host Mac builds years ago for Visual Studio Team Services - now known as Azure Devops.
tyre 6y ago
These are pretty expensive for most uses — another article of theirs calculates ~73 days to equal the cost of outright buying one and the 24 hour minimum is a high floor for, say, nightly tasks. One thing I've been wanting to do for a while is integrate with iMessage. iMessage stores a local SQLite database of message history. A forever-running MacOS instance could sync that with The Cloud and open up some pretty cool applications.
- speedgoose 6y ago
  Its pretty standard with AWS. You also get much better performances from an old laptop than most VMs. You don't pay for the hardware but everything else.
- mataug 6y ago
  I believe the 24hr minimum is a requirement by Apple not AWS. I remember reading somewhere that renting a Mac mini node from AWS has the same rental policies as renting a physical Mac mini from a rental company. It makes a lot of sense to have a 24hr minimum when renting a physical machine delivered to a workplace, but it seems weird to have the same policies when renting a Mac mini on the cloud.
  - lostcolony 6y ago
    It would make sense for a third party to require 24 hours minimum, but it seems really weird for -Apple- to be dictating what a third party rental company's minimum rental duration is. I understand it's for the license (i.e., "on this day the one seat license was used by X, on this other day, Y, and all other times by Z"), but that seems kind of arbitrary.
    - judge2020 6y ago
      it's arbitrary but it's more the license for MacOS and not the Mac hardware itself. If you (are able to) flash linux on the Mac, you won't be bound to the MacOS license terms and can rent it out without the consecutive 24 hour minimum, although at that point you might as well just run a graviton2 instance.
geofft 6y ago
HN's policy of automated title mangling strikes again - the original title is "How AWS Added Apple Mac Mini Nodes to EC2." That is, this article isn't a discussion of the mere fact that it was added (we discussed that a few weeks ago), but it has pictures of rackmounted Mac Minis with their custom hardware. As of this writing, only 1-2 of the comment threads are related to the actual subject of the article (why Apple doesn't produce a rackmount form-factor machine, why you can't virtualize macOS on commodity x86 hardware) and the rest are just about the fact of Macs on EC2 (why Apple doesn't run their own cloud, whether the pricing is cost-effective, etc.).
jackconsidine 6y ago
I've been waiting on an excuse to ditch my faltering Mac. Being able to RDP into an EC2 and build iOS apps or even run an emulator will be huge! Yes I know there were a few other providers before, but hadn't found one that worked in my pipeline.
- alisonkisk 6y ago
  Where's the win over getting a <$700 Mini (new or used) at home and RDPing in when you are out?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - jackconsidine 6y ago
    Fair point, but I just really prefer on demand usage. I'm averse to maintaining a mac mini (even having it plugged in and hooked up to the network). To have a server guaranteed to not have issues is the win for me. Also, pay-as-you-go generally works better for my line of business than the upfront investment, even if there is a breakeven point.
    - Tostino 6y ago
      If the break-even point is a couple months, I don't even consider renting unless it's a really short term thing. Different strokes.
jhoechtl 6y ago
Apparently industries have much more faith in APPL than in AMD. It took way longer to have Rayzen computing nodes than ARM M1 ones.
- Macha 6y ago
  These aren't M1 Macs, they're x64. There's nothing AMD CPUs can do that Intel cannot, though maybe the cost/usage patterns benefit one vendor or another at certain points in time. Apple have made it so building/testing iOS apps requires access to OS X, and OS X can only be run on Apple hardware, so they've ensured there is some segment that requires access to Apple hardware.
MisterTea 6y ago
Who is the target audience for this novelty?
- josht 6y ago
  I assume this is for co's who'd prefer rolling their own iOS CI/CD pipeline(s).
- ericcholis 6y ago
  Developers who don't have regular physical access to a Mac. My use case might be too specific. But, at home I have a Windows Desktop and Laptop. In the office I use a Mac Mini. Currently, I need to test Apple Pay for Safari. This requires test iCloud credentials. On a mac, this is difficult or prohibitive to swap between live iCloud and test iCloud logins. On Windows, testing via browser emulation is shaky at best. Also, easily sharing access to a "cloud" (read: remote) instance of macOS with other developer staff is beneficial.
  - dolni 6y ago
    Seems like the type of thing that would change pretty quickly if developers demanded an experience that wasn't complete trash. How quickly would Apple fold if all of a sudden there weren't third party applications for their devices?
    - kevincox 6y ago
      The problem is that it is chicken and egg. If all the developers switched their ecosystem would be crap and they would need to fix the experience or the users would leave. However right now it is profitable to target their users, even if it is awkward, so why wouldn't Apple (from an economic incentive) milk the developers for every penny they have. Apple is very much biting the hand(s) that feed here.
      - dolni 6y ago
        It's one thing to say that it's a chicken and egg problem for existing businesses that make money in the Apple ecosystem. It's another thing when you are still seeing new development efforts. It's 2020, this shit has been happening for a while, and it's no secret. I haven't figured out why a self-respecting developer would subject themselves to that nonsense.
mherrmann 6y ago
Just spent 4h trying to set this up. It's a pain. If you ever stop a running instance, the dedicated host - for which you are paying - stays in "Pending" mode for indefinite amounts of time. I am still stuck at getting macOS to recognize my non-default volume size > than the tiny 30 GB it comes with. Huge pains for something that should not be so hard (a decently strong macOS VM). Would not recommend.
- my123 6y ago
  Not indefinite - there's a 24 hour minimum for macOS instances on the cloud...
  - mherrmann 6y ago
    That's not what I meant. I want to deploy a new instance on the host which I have to rent for min 24. But I can't because the host is "pending".
- ManishR 6y ago
  Disclosure: I work for AWS and am part of the team that built EC2 Mac instances 1) After every stop/terminate of Mac instances, EC2 runs a scrubbing workflow on the underlying Dedicated Host to wipe the Mac mini's non-volatile storage and reset the NVRAM variables, to enable same security posture as any other EC2 instance. This workflow also upgrades the T2 chip on Mac mini to the latest BridgeOS version if needed. It may take 30-60 mins for this scrubbing workflow to complete, and up to 2-4 hours if BridgeOS update is required - during which the host shows up in "pending" state. We're actively working on lowering this scrubbing duration and really appreciate your feedback here. Important to note - You are not billed for any duration(s) during which the Mac1 Dedicated Host is in "pending" state (or any state other than "Available"). 2. Once you have increased the size of the EBS volume on your Mac1 instance, you can execute following commands within macOS guest to increase the size of your APFS container. 1. Copy and paste the first three lines PDISK=$(diskutil list physical external | head -n1 | cut -d" " -f1) APFSCONT=$(diskutil list physical external | grep "Apple_APFS" | tr -s " " | cut -d" " -f8) sudo diskutil repairDisk $PDISK 2. Accept the prompt with "y", then paste this command sudo diskutil apfs resizeContainer $APFSCONT 0 Since the EBS volume was resized after boot, an instance reboot is required before the additional disk size is available for your use.
dehrmann 6y ago
> Amazon said it is using Thunderbolt to connect its Nitro controller to the Mac Mini and provide its basic suite of EBS storage, networking, and security/ management features. That's pretty cool; they bridge ethernet/IP (I assume) to SATA or NVMe on Thunderbolt.
unixhero 6y ago
When would I need this?
RocketSyntax 6y ago
Hmm. Glad to see it happen, but expect better hardware. E.g. optimized for heat and such.
andrewdb 6y ago
It will be a beautiful day when we can run macOS workloads in a container/vm.
- chedabob 6y ago
  There's Anka https://veertu.com https://veertu.com There's Orka too, but as far as I can tell, you have to run it in MacStadium's cloud https://www.macstadium.com/orka https://www.macstadium.com/orka
jgalt212 6y ago
The official intro video shows four, yes four, Mac Minis sitting in a closet soon to be replaced by EC2 instances. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pn3miC_tTH0&t=1m10s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pn3miC_tTH0&t=1m10s "We have to maintain each individual device." There's an effete millennial joke in there somewhere.
gok 6y ago
Very neat how they bring the entire Nitro platform through the Thunderbolt ports.

I just don't understand why Apple won't offer their own cloud offerings or just straightforward partner with some public clouds and offer servers more suitable for developers than forcing people to use desktops as servers.

throwaway4good 6y ago
Makes you wonder what kind of hardware Apple is using for all their own cloud services (web, mail, messaging, icloud etc.).
- vondur 6y ago
  Don’t they use AWS like everyone else?
  - kortilla 6y ago
    Big tech companies with large bandwidth requirements don’t use AWS. Netflix doesn’t use AWS for video, Facebook doesn’t use AWS for most stuff, Google and Microsoft obviously don’t now because of competition but they didn’t before GCP and Azure were things.
  - ogre_codes 6y ago
    They used to rely heavily on AWS and Azure, but they've moved a lot in-house now.
    - Crash0v3rid3 6y ago
      Apple has been using GCP and AWS for years. My understanding was they ditched Azure.
- ruffrey 6y ago
  Apple has a self host cloud division as well as AWS according to news reports. Unclear if they run on Linux but it seems likely they must, even a bit if using AWS. Theoretically they could probably upload custom AMIs with macOS.
  - sl1ck731 6y ago
    I don't believe its possible to get macOS (or atleast wasn't) onto an AMI in anyway.
    - rescbr 6y ago
      I'd say it is possible to run Darwin on AWS, but I have never tried. FreeBSD runs well, so we know that any OS with drivers will boot on AWS. They're Apple after all, so they can build macOS to boot from a standard environment - UEFI, kernel that doesn't check the copy prevention string on SMBIOS, etc. Us, mere mortals, are more restricted, as we don't have the keys of the kingdom.
  - Crash0v3rid3 6y ago
    Apple uses GCP as well as AWS.
- IST-Throwaway 6y ago
  When I was there, a variety of brands of hardware, mostly running RHEL. In fact running OS-X in datacenters was verboten, and eventually limited to a couple of small racks running on their own network segments where you could put in a mac pro if desperately needed to.
  - wayne 6y ago
    Somewhat surprising since unlike their customers, there's no license restriction to Apple running macOS on different hardware. Maybe they didn't want to maintain a separate fork only for internal use. And having their own OS makes it more challenging to port apps to AWS/Azure.
    - watermelon0 6y ago
      The real question is how would this be beneficial to them? Almost everyone runs production systems on either Linux or Windows, so they would be an outlier, and the only one debugging and contributing to the operating system/libraries/etc. I've read before on HN about people using Mac hardware in production, when they needed access to macOS graphics API, but since this only concerns a software implementation, and hardware was standard until M1 processors, it's reasonable to assume that Apple could port that part of OS to Linux, if they needed to use it from servers.
  - throwaway4good 6y ago
    "Running OS-X in datacenters was verboten" Why?
    - cma 6y ago
      Maybe they didn't want to run into a tech debt thing of "we can't push this update to consumers even though it would cause no issues for them, because it would break X and Y on our backend servers and the two would have to diverge for some time until we come up with a fix."
    - toast0 6y ago
      I'm not an Apple insider, but I can imagine many reasons. For one thing, the tcp stack is ancient, and easy to syn flood. (It was forked from FreeBSD in 2001ish, before FreeBSD added syncookies and syncache). Synflooding os x makes the whole network stack unresponsive, including other interfaces like localhost.
- kevincox 6y ago
  I'm really curious what they use for their CI. Do they compile all of their iOS apps on Apple hardware? Or do they get the luxury of using proper server hardware and software?
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    Lots of Mac Pros, some virtual machines.
notRobot 6y ago
Because Apple really doesn't care about anything to do with developers. It's too tiny a percentage of their user base.
- api 6y ago
  It's a large part of their Mac user base. That being said, I don't think Apple has enough people who would be interested in hosting on MacOS to justify an Apple cloud offering. I think they know that.
  - notRobot 6y ago
    > It's a large part of their Mac user base. Is it really? Lots of devs use Macs, yes. But compared to the sheer number of regular, non-dev users, that has to be tiiiiny. I found lots of stats on the internet about what percentage of developers use Macs, but none about how just many Mac users are developers, so it'd be fascinating to see that number of anyone can find it.
    - ogre_codes 6y ago
      It's not about the percentage of users. Developers fuel their platform. Without developers MacOS and iOS are nothing. Apple knows this.
      - oblio 6y ago
        They definitely care about devs less than Microsoft. They know that they have a relatively captive rich user base and devs will kowtow to them in order to develop stuff they can sell to that user base. That's the real target. And you can see it by how they treat the development tools (stuff like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25563276 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25563276 or the many deprecations, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25562604 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25562604). Or CI/CD setups using their tools.
        6y ago
emeraldd 6y ago
I suspect they don't believe there is a market for them or at least not enough of a market to justify the development expense. I know they've tried producing a "server" in the past and even a server version of their operating system, but it didn't seem to go anywhere. Unless they had a way to meaningfully compete with Windows and Linux (really, linux) the only viable market I can see is for build systems, and that's pretty niche.
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  With Servers you have to maintain a good supply chain and deal with institutional buyers. It's almost a parallels business to the rest of their offering. They won't get support at the genius bar... Server OS seemed to be targeted at small businesses to run on a Mac Pro or Mac Mini connected to NAS and hosting internal applications. But it wasn't very different from regular OSX.
jrwoodruff 6y ago
They tried, but it's just not their DNA. Apple isn't a B2B enterprise company, they're a B2C consumer company that, as a side effect of their consumer success, ended up with a decent number of devices in enterprises. But they know they can't, and don't want to try, to win against the big entrenched enterprise players. https://www.zdnet.com/article/why-apple-had-to-kill-the-xserve/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/why-apple-had-to-kill-the-xser...
- secabeen 6y ago
  Yeah, they certainly don't have the right DNA on the hardware side. On the software side, they've been working a lot more closely with JAMF recently, and there's quite a bit of enterprise support in the MDM space there.
  - mintone 6y ago
    Can confirm with this, when we approached Apple on MDM they all but opened an account for us with JAMF.
  - mrpippy 6y ago
    They also bought Fleetsmith recently
  - lostlogin 6y ago
    Apple Remote Desktop is a pretty neglected app but it’s fantastically good. It’s got so many features that make remote administration so very good.
- ketamine__ 6y ago
  Am I wrong to think there are workloads that can only be run on Mac? Seems like a competitive advantage.
  - Macha 6y ago
    The only workloads that can only be run on a mac are those which are Apple specific, such as building/testing iOS apps.
jedberg 6y ago
One of the rules on these Macs in AWS is that you have to rent them for a minimum of 24 hours at a time and you have to rent the whole machine. I think they don't want to cannibalize Mac sales. If you want to make an iPhone app, you have to buy a Mac to do it. They don't want to make it easy for you to rent one just to compile the app.
- jjeaff 6y ago
  That's the only reason I need them, to compile a binary and submit it. But can apple dictate licensing terms like this? If aws buys a mac, can't they use it however they like? Or are there terms limiting this in the purchase agreement.
  - kayodelycaon 6y ago
    Can Microsoft dictate the terms under which you can use their software? Some companies only charge for commercial use of their products. So the “it’s free” argument doesn’t really hold water.
    - scarface74 6y ago
      Yes. Software companies dictate whether their software has to be run on a dedicate host, the allowed number of cores, etc. all of the time. Companies have tried to “rent DVDs” digitally by playing the DVD on their hardware and streaming it. It got shot down by the courts.
  - est31 6y ago
    I agree that what you want to do should be possible and cheap, but generally if you build something for a platform you'd also want to test it on that platform, no? What you say implies that you compile the binary and don't test it before submitting?
    - lukeramsden 6y ago
      Automated testing should be done at CI stage, and you can submit a binary to Apple without having to send it live on the AppStore (TestFlight is for that), or you could send it to other beta distribution channels
ksec 6y ago
Well there will be a ARM Mac Pro, so hopefully that will be rack mountable. And any Cloud customer can have it hosted. I do wish they have less restriction on macOS usage timing. And a services for Web Developers to test their site on Safari. Which is currently impossible to do with buying a Mac.
- theobeers 6y ago
  It seems to me that the licensing situation—you have to lease a whole machine for a minimum period of 24 hours—will make the Mac Pro a poor choice in most contexts. The Mac Mini at or near its base configuration may remain the most sensible option.
  - skohan 6y ago
    It would be kind of crazy to imagine, if the M-series processor for the Mac Pro is among the best performing CPUs in the world - which it may turn out to be - that these processors would be virtually inaccessible in the server space in any relevant way. It seems like something which should not result from a free market. I wonder how "usage" is defined here: for instance, if I run a managed service on a fleet of Macs in the cloud, which serves many end customers from each machine, is this allowed under the terms?
    - ghaff 6y ago
      >if I run a managed service on a fleet of Macs in the cloud, which serves many end customers from each machine, is this allowed under the terms? IANAL (and haven't read the full EULA) but probably. The 24 hour restriction seems to apply to leasing. I would assume that running a multi-tenant managed service (or, for that matter, serving web pages) from a Mac would not be seen as leasing.
  - JoshTriplett 6y ago
    > It seems to me that the licensing situation—you have to lease a whole machine for a minimum period of 24 hours—will make the Mac Pro a poor choice in most contexts Not necessarily. A Mac Pro would work well for single-tenant usage where you want to run a series of applications that can each burst to the whole machine but not take long to finish.
jbverschoor 6y ago
They will...
rnantes 6y ago
I could see Apple come out with their own in-house Cloud Computing platform within the next 2 years. - They would be vertically integrated with Apple Silicon - Apple themselves are increasingly depending on cloud services - Async/Await in Swift will likely land next year, making Server-Side Swift much more appealing - Apple is greatly increasing cloud / Kubernetes hires - Could share a single Apple Silicon ARM architecture from client(ios) to dev(mac) to cloud
- madeofpalk 6y ago
  I’m dubious. The only way I could see this happening is if it was some companion platform for iCloud/iOS apps. I just don’t understand what anyone has to gain from Apple making an “open” cloud platform.
- DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
  > I could see Apple come out with their own in-house Cloud Computing platform within the next 2 years. Apple, as a company, does not "do" long-term support; they're the anti-Microsoft when it comes to backwards compatibility. As soon as you start being an infrastructure service provider that means you HAVE to offer an LTSB branch of your OS, and Apple does not want to do that (and macOS has stagnated a lot since Apple devoted most of their OS engineering efforts to iOS). Apple doesn't offer a "real" server OS SKU at all (the "macOS Server" app package is for SOHO management, not for use as a high-availability application server OS). ...which means that Apple would have to provide an offering using Linux or BSD - such as a "naked" Darwin distro - but again, Apple does not want to have to support that, and I'm sure devs don't want to see the IaaS OS scene fragment further, and Darwin is far, far removed from being yet another Linux distro. Amazon offers ARM cloud systems - why should Apple risk their profitability by competing in an arena that doesn't pose any risk to their bottom-line? And what do they have to gain?
  - e40 6y ago
    This is the fly in the oinment. I would love to see Apple have an LTS branch of macOS, but I just don't see this happening. Too much would need to change in the company for that to happen. From a macOS developer's standpoint, it's really a huge PITA there is no LTS. But, we adjust. Because we have a low-level product (compiler), we sometimes get into a situation where we need to sunset a product before we would normally do that, just because the older product doesn't run on the supported macOS versions. Doesn't happen often, but it does happen.
AlphaSite 6y ago
I think with their recent hiring spree for core K8s contributors and another factor they may well do. It’s something they’ve dipped their toes into in the past for iCloud services. If I remember correctly they previously bundled icloud services where each user got a slice of storage on the cloud, so I could see them extending that model to a time slice of compute as well, hosted on some form of K8s. I think the previous model was too limited for most use cases, but it’s not fundamentally broken. I don’t think the economics of the M1 with 32+ cores make sense unless they go down the route of either build a cloud platform and amortise the cost of the chip design over a larger number of devices (or a chip let approach, but I’m not sure this matches their general design approach). Also I’m pretty sure they think they have a competitive advantage over traditional x86 and ARM vendors so they’ll likely want to strike while that still holds.
- kbenson 6y ago
  > If I remember correctly they previously bundled icloud services where each user got a slice of storage on the cloud, so I could see them extending that model to a time slice of compute as well, hosted on some form of K8s. I think the previous model was too limited for most use cases, but it’s not fundamentally broken. The average Apple consumer customer can make plenty of use of cloud storage. What use does the average user have for cloud compute resources? Unless Apple starts offloading some processing to the cloud, and gives them some free, I'm not sure how regular users would use this, and offering it for free assuming the majority of people won't use it is just asking for some popular app to come along that takes advantage of that and screws up the economics. Not to mention people probably won't be happy to have a limit and pay for overage use for stuff that is likely provided by free on other platforms (if Google Photos prettifies your photos for free and Apple does it through metered compute with some given free, that's bad optics).
  - crooked-v 6y ago
    Also, Apple has quite a lot of effort into specifically running things locally rather than in the cloud. For example, Photos.app does all its facial recognition and 'Memory' creation locally.
  - 6y ago
bradknowles 6y ago
Apple had rack-mount servers. They got rid of them. I don’t know the exact reasons why, but I assume it’s because there weren’t enough people buying them and they couldn’t make enough profit on building and supporting them. I did find it interesting that Apple took the entire last run of that hardware for themselves, so that they could run their own internal VMware clusters on real Apple hardware for their developers. There’s no way that Apple could build an AMI to run on hardware designed and built by someone else. Apple has a small number of people who really know what they’re doing, and they get shifted around to whatever project Apple thinks is most important — whether that’s hardware or software. Apple needs to own the whole enchilada here, for multiple reasons. So, they can sell Apple hardware to AWS for inclusion inside of AWS data centers. But it has to be real-deal Apple hardware, running real-deal Apple OS, even if it is under a hyper visor like VMWare.

ogre_codes 6y ago

Considering how much Apple has been helping MacStadium and the volume of Mac minis going to rack based installs, I'm surprised Apple hasn't made them a little more rack mount friendly. Seems like they could just make a special case-less sled with only minor tweaks to the existing mini design. Obviously they would need to build a sled/ server chassis too with networking and power delivery.

wil421 6y ago
It sounds like upper management said no to the server market years ago and doesn’t want to sell a “server”. But they’ll happily sell you a Mac mini to build a server farm.
- rualca 6y ago
  Arguably, mac minis are servers that can be repurposed as desktops. Even in their marketing blurbs Apple advertises mac minis as build and render farms.
- shagie 6y ago
  The Mac mini isn't intended for that type of use... they do make a rack mount Mac Pro ( https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-pro/rack https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-pro/rack ). Give it a generation to get to the M series chips.
  - ogre_codes 6y ago
    > The Mac mini isn't intended for that type of use The mini absolutely is intended for use as a server. It's what Apple provided to Mac Stadium for OSS projects to build on. Very few Mac Pros are used for CI servers, they are mostly used for video and audio processing.
ftio 6y ago
All the big players who rack Mac Minis already have custom rack equipment that fits Mac Minis of this form factor. I suspect the design hasn’t changed at all primarily for this reason.

jjeaff 6y ago

Is there some licensing issue with Apple that requires this minimum monthly usage? It appears aws is charging $1/hr with a 24 hr minimum which is similar to every other provider out there that is offering MacOS instances. I was excited to see that AWS was offering these as I assumed it would be priced just like everything else - hourly with no minimums. I literally need access a few hrs a month for submitting binary updates to the app store. And I suspect there are a lot of other users with this same use case which may explain the consistent policy of minimum monthly usage.

wmf 6y ago
Yes, Apple requires a 24-hour minimum.
whoknew1122 6y ago
Yes. It's licensing.
- jjeaff 6y ago
  So when I buy a mac mini at Best Buy, am I somehow agreeing to that policy?
  - Macha 6y ago
    When you click accept in the initial setup that has a link to T&Cs that informs you can return it for a refund if you don't agree. How legally enforceable clickwrap such as that is varies from country to country.
epmaybe 6y ago
How do you test the updates without a Mac? Sorry I’m sure I’m missing something
seanwilson 6y ago
> It appears aws is charging $1/hr with a 24 hr minimum which is similar to every other provider out there that is offering MacOS instances. How much per month? Around $720?

jasoneckert 6y ago

Given that these are x86_64 Mac Minis, I'm surprised that Apple and Amazon couldn't work out a virtualization agreement that would allow Amazon to run macOS on their existing hypervisors. Higher education has been trying to do that with Apple for a decade now, but they don't have Amazon's clout.

bhawks 6y ago
Apple is adamantly opposed to allowing this use case. It doesn't matter who is asking them.
- lloeki 6y ago
  Ever since Lion(? IIRC when the license terms changed) there was nothing preventing a hypervisor to run on bare Apple metal and host macOS in VMs; in fact a frequently used one is VMware ESXi/Vsphere. It just seems that the market isn't there and people just go for full-machine MacStadium rental or use their own hardware.
  - comex 6y ago
    As of Big Sur [1], the license explicitly requires providers to rent out an entire machine at a time. [1] https://9to5mac.com/2020/11/11/macos-big-sur-adds-leasing-terms-that-pull-hosting-services-like-macstadium-out-of-a-legal-gray-area/ https://9to5mac.com/2020/11/11/macos-big-sur-adds-leasing-te...
    - lloeki 6y ago
      Indeed. Also, the "purposes" of Section 3 explicitly lists CI as "(B)", followed (confusingly) by "B.". > For purposes of this Section 3: (A) End User Lessee means a Lessee who is the end user ultimately using the leased Apple Software solely for Permitted Developer Services; and (B) Permitted Developer Services means 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. Each Lessor must provide Apple with advance notice prior to leasing or subleasing the Apple Software pursuant to this Section 3 by contacting Apple Developer Relations (https://developer.apple.com/contact/macos-license/ https://developer.apple.com/contact/macos-license/). > B. Subleasing. A Lessee may further sublease the Apple Software pursuant to this Section 3 provided that such Lessee complies with all of the terms of this Section 3. A Lessee subleasing the Apple Software (who shall also be considered a Lessor under this Section 3) must fully relinquish exclusive use and control of the Apple Software and the Apple-branded hardware on which it is installed to its Lessee during the lease period. From which I understand that e.g 1. MacStadium is a "Lessor", 2. GitHub is a "Lessee" that does subleasing and has to lease for 24h minimum, and 3. a GitHub Actions user is a "End User Lessee" but could lease for fractions of 24h. Strangely this means that GH cannot provide macOS on its own! Also, this seems to mean that GH has to provide bare metal to its users, not VMs ("must fully relinquish exclusive use and control of the Apple Software and the Apple-branded hardware"), which is too bad given what you can do with VMs[0]. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25568613 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25568613

amelius 6y ago

Does this mean we can finally compile for the Apple platform without owning an Apple computer?

stingraycharles 6y ago
Yes but there’s a minimum rent period of 24h, which means you’ll lose the benefits of a cloud provider over an on-premise OSX “build box”.
- amelius 6y ago
  Strange, Apple should be subsidizing compilation for Apple's platform instead.
  - kevincox 6y ago
    That moves less hardware. If they actually wanted to make it easy to develop software they would allow compiling on other platforms, and ideally provide a VM to test on. This is why I support IE and Edge on personal sites but not Safari. You can download free VMs from Microsoft for web testing, but you have to pay Apple to make things work on their platform.
ratww 6y ago
You could already do it using CIs like BitRise, Circle or even GH Actions. CIs are probably cheaper due to the AWS 24h minimum.
- scarface74 6y ago
  Also, MS offered host Mac builds years ago for Visual Studio Team Services - now known as Azure Devops.

tyre 6y ago

These are pretty expensive for most uses — another article of theirs calculates ~73 days to equal the cost of outright buying one and the 24 hour minimum is a high floor for, say, nightly tasks. One thing I've been wanting to do for a while is integrate with iMessage. iMessage stores a local SQLite database of message history. A forever-running MacOS instance could sync that with The Cloud and open up some pretty cool applications.

speedgoose 6y ago
Its pretty standard with AWS. You also get much better performances from an old laptop than most VMs. You don't pay for the hardware but everything else.
mataug 6y ago
I believe the 24hr minimum is a requirement by Apple not AWS. I remember reading somewhere that renting a Mac mini node from AWS has the same rental policies as renting a physical Mac mini from a rental company. It makes a lot of sense to have a 24hr minimum when renting a physical machine delivered to a workplace, but it seems weird to have the same policies when renting a Mac mini on the cloud.
- lostcolony 6y ago
  It would make sense for a third party to require 24 hours minimum, but it seems really weird for -Apple- to be dictating what a third party rental company's minimum rental duration is. I understand it's for the license (i.e., "on this day the one seat license was used by X, on this other day, Y, and all other times by Z"), but that seems kind of arbitrary.
  - judge2020 6y ago
    it's arbitrary but it's more the license for MacOS and not the Mac hardware itself. If you (are able to) flash linux on the Mac, you won't be bound to the MacOS license terms and can rent it out without the consecutive 24 hour minimum, although at that point you might as well just run a graviton2 instance.

geofft 6y ago

HN's policy of automated title mangling strikes again - the original title is "How AWS Added Apple Mac Mini Nodes to EC2." That is, this article isn't a discussion of the mere fact that it was added (we discussed that a few weeks ago), but it has pictures of rackmounted Mac Minis with their custom hardware. As of this writing, only 1-2 of the comment threads are related to the actual subject of the article (why Apple doesn't produce a rackmount form-factor machine, why you can't virtualize macOS on commodity x86 hardware) and the rest are just about the fact of Macs on EC2 (why Apple doesn't run their own cloud, whether the pricing is cost-effective, etc.).

jackconsidine 6y ago

I've been waiting on an excuse to ditch my faltering Mac. Being able to RDP into an EC2 and build iOS apps or even run an emulator will be huge! Yes I know there were a few other providers before, but hadn't found one that worked in my pipeline.

alisonkisk 6y ago
Where's the win over getting a <$700 Mini (new or used) at home and RDPing in when you are out?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- jackconsidine 6y ago
  Fair point, but I just really prefer on demand usage. I'm averse to maintaining a mac mini (even having it plugged in and hooked up to the network). To have a server guaranteed to not have issues is the win for me. Also, pay-as-you-go generally works better for my line of business than the upfront investment, even if there is a breakeven point.
  - Tostino 6y ago
    If the break-even point is a couple months, I don't even consider renting unless it's a really short term thing. Different strokes.

jhoechtl 6y ago

Apparently industries have much more faith in APPL than in AMD. It took way longer to have Rayzen computing nodes than ARM M1 ones.

Macha 6y ago
These aren't M1 Macs, they're x64. There's nothing AMD CPUs can do that Intel cannot, though maybe the cost/usage patterns benefit one vendor or another at certain points in time. Apple have made it so building/testing iOS apps requires access to OS X, and OS X can only be run on Apple hardware, so they've ensured there is some segment that requires access to Apple hardware.

MisterTea 6y ago

Who is the target audience for this novelty?

josht 6y ago
I assume this is for co's who'd prefer rolling their own iOS CI/CD pipeline(s).
ericcholis 6y ago
Developers who don't have regular physical access to a Mac. My use case might be too specific. But, at home I have a Windows Desktop and Laptop. In the office I use a Mac Mini. Currently, I need to test Apple Pay for Safari. This requires test iCloud credentials. On a mac, this is difficult or prohibitive to swap between live iCloud and test iCloud logins. On Windows, testing via browser emulation is shaky at best. Also, easily sharing access to a "cloud" (read: remote) instance of macOS with other developer staff is beneficial.
- dolni 6y ago
  Seems like the type of thing that would change pretty quickly if developers demanded an experience that wasn't complete trash. How quickly would Apple fold if all of a sudden there weren't third party applications for their devices?
  - kevincox 6y ago
    The problem is that it is chicken and egg. If all the developers switched their ecosystem would be crap and they would need to fix the experience or the users would leave. However right now it is profitable to target their users, even if it is awkward, so why wouldn't Apple (from an economic incentive) milk the developers for every penny they have. Apple is very much biting the hand(s) that feed here.
    - dolni 6y ago
      It's one thing to say that it's a chicken and egg problem for existing businesses that make money in the Apple ecosystem. It's another thing when you are still seeing new development efforts. It's 2020, this shit has been happening for a while, and it's no secret. I haven't figured out why a self-respecting developer would subject themselves to that nonsense.

mherrmann 6y ago

Just spent 4h trying to set this up. It's a pain. If you ever stop a running instance, the dedicated host - for which you are paying - stays in "Pending" mode for indefinite amounts of time. I am still stuck at getting macOS to recognize my non-default volume size > than the tiny 30 GB it comes with. Huge pains for something that should not be so hard (a decently strong macOS VM). Would not recommend.

my123 6y ago
Not indefinite - there's a 24 hour minimum for macOS instances on the cloud...
- mherrmann 6y ago
  That's not what I meant. I want to deploy a new instance on the host which I have to rent for min 24. But I can't because the host is "pending".
ManishR 6y ago
Disclosure: I work for AWS and am part of the team that built EC2 Mac instances 1) After every stop/terminate of Mac instances, EC2 runs a scrubbing workflow on the underlying Dedicated Host to wipe the Mac mini's non-volatile storage and reset the NVRAM variables, to enable same security posture as any other EC2 instance. This workflow also upgrades the T2 chip on Mac mini to the latest BridgeOS version if needed. It may take 30-60 mins for this scrubbing workflow to complete, and up to 2-4 hours if BridgeOS update is required - during which the host shows up in "pending" state. We're actively working on lowering this scrubbing duration and really appreciate your feedback here. Important to note - You are not billed for any duration(s) during which the Mac1 Dedicated Host is in "pending" state (or any state other than "Available"). 2. Once you have increased the size of the EBS volume on your Mac1 instance, you can execute following commands within macOS guest to increase the size of your APFS container. 1. Copy and paste the first three lines PDISK=$(diskutil list physical external | head -n1 | cut -d" " -f1) APFSCONT=$(diskutil list physical external | grep "Apple_APFS" | tr -s " " | cut -d" " -f8) sudo diskutil repairDisk $PDISK 2. Accept the prompt with "y", then paste this command sudo diskutil apfs resizeContainer $APFSCONT 0 Since the EBS volume was resized after boot, an instance reboot is required before the additional disk size is available for your use.

dehrmann 6y ago

> Amazon said it is using Thunderbolt to connect its Nitro controller to the Mac Mini and provide its basic suite of EBS storage, networking, and security/ management features. That's pretty cool; they bridge ethernet/IP (I assume) to SATA or NVMe on Thunderbolt.

unixhero 6y ago

When would I need this?

RocketSyntax 6y ago

Hmm. Glad to see it happen, but expect better hardware. E.g. optimized for heat and such.

andrewdb 6y ago

It will be a beautiful day when we can run macOS workloads in a container/vm.

chedabob 6y ago
There's Anka https://veertu.com https://veertu.com There's Orka too, but as far as I can tell, you have to run it in MacStadium's cloud https://www.macstadium.com/orka https://www.macstadium.com/orka

jgalt212 6y ago

The official intro video shows four, yes four, Mac Minis sitting in a closet soon to be replaced by EC2 instances. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pn3miC_tTH0&t=1m10s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pn3miC_tTH0&t=1m10s "We have to maintain each individual device." There's an effete millennial joke in there somewhere.

gok 6y ago

Very neat how they bring the entire Nitro platform through the Thunderbolt ports.