16 ms·

Apple silicon M1 as-a-Service

362 points by edouardb 6y ago

amzans 6y ago
I am getting an “ Oops, an error occurred!” message. Update: I opened it with Chrome and it works fine. It’s not a “hug of death” as I initially thought. It’s on Safari (iPhone 12 Pro iOS 14.4) that it’s always leading to the error above. In case it’s helpful for the website owners if they see this.
- hans1729 6y ago
  Works flawless for me, both before and after you commented.
- IceWreck 6y ago
  I don't see an error message and can view the page but if a hosting company's website can be "hugged to death" then that doesn't exactly inspire confidence in them.
  - jiofih 6y ago
    You’re right, everything besides AWS and GCS sucks. Thanks for warning the rest of us /s If it’s only failing in one browser it’s obviously not a capacity issue. Works on my iPhone btw.
- pmontra 6y ago
  Firefox Android: it works only if I request the desktop site.
hans1729 6y ago
I wonder who precicely this is targeted for. The concept is interesting, but doesn't everyone who develops for macos already have a mac? Or is this actually an economic path with respect to cloud computing?
- k_bx 6y ago
  Our startup relies on server-side HTML rendering in Headless Chrome, and some ImageMagick image manipulation. Due to how optimised these machines are for this use-case, I do plan to evaluate them to replace the much pricier AWS instances.
  - catmanjan 6y ago
    Have you tried browserless.io?
    - k_bx 6y ago
      Thanks, might check it out
  - bzb6 6y ago
    I don’t see how those things need a Mac
    - bartvk 6y ago
      But they could have a preference for the platform, no?
    - jiofih 6y ago
      A dedicated x86 machine with equivalent performance for those two tasks is a lot more expensive.
      - gallexme 6y ago
        (if i get it correctly it's mostly cause it's a gpu bound task? (hardware acceleration of the browser engine?)) Back in 2017 hetzner offered gtx1080s for around 70€ a month with 64gb ram and and a 4+ghz quad Intel CPU, n 2x 512gb ssd Im sure these days it's not hard enough to find smth with equilavent processing power in that price range Maybe even direct contact with hetzner could help you out these days(they stopped offering them cause of abuse) And if it's not a gpu bound task but badly concurrently cpu tasks Then maybe a game server specific dedicated hosting (they use consumer CPUs with uo to 5+ghz single core performance) wouldn't also be a lot of money N if its a good concurrency task then the amd CPU offering of hetzner beats all(high memory, insanely fast iops, lots of core) , and has a offering for 5950x these days
IceWreck 6y ago
72 EUR/month. At that price, why not keep them in house ? It would be cheaper.
- hkt 6y ago
  Scaleway have an API that could realistically be driven through a CI process. Assuming the idea is to do automated testing, and to destroy instances when done, the cost is likely to be pretty low.
  - vbezhenar 6y ago
    Apple does not allow renting Macs less than 24 hours.
    - hkt 6y ago
      The page specifies the price is hourly and doesn't seem to list that restriction. Could you please link to where it is specified? Edit: I don't think you're right. I've checked the Scaleway console and it appears the minimum unit of billing for this is one hour. I'd check, but they're out of stock. Second edit: I missed the part where it says 24 hour minimum period on the instance setup page: "As required by Apple License, you must keep this instance at least 24 hours. You will be able to delete it only after 24 hours."
      - dmlittle 6y ago
        Here[1] is the license for BigSur. The relevant section is 3.A.(ii). This clause was added for BigSur so I _think_ that if you're leasing a VPS with macOS Catalina or older you can legally rent it for less than 24 hours. [1] https://www.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/macOSBigSur.pdf https://www.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/macOSBigSur.pdf Edit: It seems that before BigSur the legallity of subleasing macOS was a "gray area". I guess as long as it doesn't hurt Apple they didn't come after you.
        cromka 6y ago
tomschwiha 6y ago
A product landingpage without any price information is imo a No-Go.
- skw-hn 6y ago
  The price is in the bubble near the macbook image. 0.10€/h
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- jafingi 6y ago
  Funny, because the price is in the top most hero section on my computer. €0.10/hour
- epaga 6y ago
  That's exactly how I feel, which is why I was pleasantly surprised to see "0.10€/hour M1 Mac Mini" right there on the front page.
  - vbezhenar 6y ago
    What’s the minimum period?
    - angristan 6y ago
      It's 24h, as requested by Apple's EULA
  - doingitwell 6y ago
    That isn’t shown on mobile. Seems like poor design.
    - orangepanda 6y ago
      It's also part of an svg. Is it accessible to screen readers?
hkt 6y ago
That there is a product coup. Impressive. They've still got all the good qualities of a startup but in most meaningful senses they now seem to have the scale and sophistication of offering their global competitors have. Today I'm on the cusp of launching something on there. I used them first for the cheap ARM instances (3eur a month or so) and now for their Kapsule offering. I avoided Amazon, Microsoft and Google out of a sense of moral indignation about their tax affairs. Declaration of interest: I've been using Scaleway for a few years now and really, really like them.
simplecto 6y ago
I’ve been a customer for years and enjoy having access to their team via slack. I recommend giving them a spin— nice to have players other than the big three cloud providers.
- hkt 6y ago
  Came here to say much the same thing. They're a joy to deal with on Slack.
maga 6y ago
I'm curious about how the hardware side of it all looks. Does Apple sell chips to these cloud providers or they are indeed using real/modified Mac Minis?
- teruakohatu 6y ago
  I believe it is Mac Minis but I would think they strip them of the case.
  - jiofih 6y ago
    The aluminum case is a massive heat sink, no reason to remove it.
    - JCBird1012 6y ago
      If it's already in a cooled data center, removing it could mean being able to fit more Minis in a rack with little downside to thermals. The aluminum case makes sense when you're not in a climate-controlled environment.
- IceWreck 6y ago
  I saw a video of a mac only data center and they made customized racks to optimally fit real consumer Macs into those racks. They had those for the trashcan/cheese-grator macs, mac minis and well as the all-in-one macs for special use cases (yes they put those all in ones in a rack)
- skw-hn 6y ago
  They use real retail macs. As for the modifications i don't know.
- detaro 6y ago
  Using actual Macs is the only way. Apple does not care about helping cloud providers in any way (e.g. even just an exception to the 24h rental requirement would be huge for them, but not even AWS got that).
jedisct1 6y ago
This is amazing!
throw14082020 6y ago
Here are some marketing videos: Scaleway: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZJnrKjfA3s&feature=emb_title https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZJnrKjfA3s&feature=emb_titl... Amazon's Mac Mini: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pn3miC_tTH0&feature=emb_title https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pn3miC_tTH0&feature=emb_titl... Pricing: Scaleway Mac Mini M1: ~$85/month (converted from 70Euro's) MacStadium Mac Mini M1: $109/month Amazon Intel Mac Mini (they don't have m1): ~$26 per day, ~$780/month. Therefore, at NO scale, does Amazon mac mini sense. Amazon's pitch is to help companies reduce their infrastructure problem. Except for every machine you use on Amazon for a month, you could buy a brand new M1 mac mini
- christophilus 6y ago
  AWS’s margin is Scaleway’s opportunity, you might say.
  - dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
    Normally yes, it should be, but I don't think it's going to happen. People have been (1) miscalculating the costs of AWS, (2) realizing they are relatively high but deciding to stick to them for various reasons for a long time now. And because Amazon managed to capture many companies with their marketing, in many cases it's practically impossible to get out.
    - christophilus 6y ago
      Yeah. It was just a snarky play on the famous Bezos quote, "Your margin is my opportunity."
- tumblewit 6y ago
  Given the ridiculously low power requirement of m1 chips if anyone wants to use these probably in small scale capacities they should just buy it. The power and maintenance won't be that much if a hassle (10 of these would use less than 300w) and you would get warranty too. I think the mac mini m1 was designed (lack of) by apple to replace current mac mini racks but ideally this thing can be as tiny as a 3rd gen apple tv and a rack of 10-20 could be as small as a mac pro ...
Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
I was using Scalway's ARM (Cavium) 2core/2GB instance for a web application (HTML+Minimal Vanilla JS+Go+PSQL) until they suddenly pulled the plug on their ARM instances. I didn't like the way they did it and so I migrated to AWS x86 T2.micro 1core/1GB, but surprisingly the application seems faster here although I think Scaleway had greater network bandwidth. It may be that I didn't use ARM optimized version of PostgreSQL or some other variable I'm missing. But anyways Apple M1 could be more performant than any of the low-mid x86 offering considering the work is optimized for ARM.
- jtwigg 6y ago
  I recieved plenty of emails in good notice and saw warnings throughout the console about the disconinuation of arm. moving away from arm was easy too.
  - Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
    Received the first email in April telling, technical support would end in July and servers pulled out by December. No detail or technical documentation on why they had to do it and just pointed their customers to the migration document. What about those customers who had spent extensive resources on optimising their work for ARM, when they forced a x86 migration? A cloud provider can do better than just 3 months notice. Naturally it was not just me who was unhappy[1]. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22866216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22866216
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
Jamieee 6y ago
For what it's worth, I've been using Scaleway for a few years and have had a really great experience. I would absolutely recommend them.
woile 6y ago
Nice to see them on hackernews, I've been using their service for the last 2 months no issue so far. They even have an issue tracker answered by humans for all my inquires. Intuitive UI! Hope they keep growing, it'd be nice if they had some cluster outside europe as well
reconquestio 6y ago
Sounds great, but I will not go for this the second time, Scaleway. Two years ago I purchased a server there, configured everything and started handling workload. Then I received the following email: Our support team created a new ticket associated to your account. Hello, Your instance 'REDACTED' is running on a hypervisor that encountered a critical failure. We are not able to power on the hypervisor again. We were not able to recover your local files located on your LSSD. Your node has been stopped. If you created snapshots of the server's volumes or if you halted your node recently, you will recover your volumes at their latest good state. We are sorry for the inconvenience. Scaleway Team ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- sillysaurusx 6y ago
  Problems happen. Did you contact support and ask for a refund? How did they respond? If the PSU failed, there's not a lot they can do to prevent a critical failure. (Sounds like the drive failed in this case.)
  - batterylow 6y ago
    > Did you contact support and ask for a refund? How did they respond? How this was resolved is the most important part in my opinion
  - Daho0n 6y ago
    >If the PSU failed The PSU? As in one (1)? Because then, to quote Adam Savage, Well there's your problem!
    - morganvachon 6y ago
      Yeah that caught my eye as well. My home media server is a repurposed Dell tower server with redundant PSUs, if I can swing that for non-critical movies and TV shows, surely a large scale cloud provider will have not only redundant PSUs on each node, but their storage will be redundant and rebuildable as well? Else what are their customers actually paying for?
- 6y ago
xchaotic 6y ago
I signed up to test this and they are already out of capacity. I hope they can keep ordering more quickly...
jimmcslim 6y ago
For Scaleway and Amazon, does Apple ship these Mac Minis in the same packaging as retail, or do they strip it down to something less wasteful at that scale?
- tuananh 6y ago
  from the images that i saw on the news, aws just shove those M1 mini into the rack.
xchaotic 6y ago
Can anyone recommend a database that already works on the M1 chips?
- jarym 6y ago
  Not used it on M1 yet but Postgres seems to: https://info.crunchydata.com/blog/postgresql-benchmarks-apple-arm-m1-macbook-pro-2020 https://info.crunchydata.com/blog/postgresql-benchmarks-appl...
ing33k 6y ago
No Nitro... Just a Mac mini this nitro https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/nitro/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/nitro/ ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  Is Nitro a problem? It's there to stop users destroying the hardware, and has minimal performance impact.
- dx034 6y ago
  Isn't nitro mostly AWS marketing? They profit from it as they burn fewer CPU cycles on virtualization for shared hardware. But on dedicated hardware you own everything anyway, so why bother if AWS virtualization runs there? The big difference is support for AWS ecosystem (also partly realized via nitro). You won't get that but for that price difference it's probably still ok.
javchz 6y ago
Anybody knows if Scaleway it's better than the parent company? I was an online.net costumer for a lot of years for a personal project, and a happy one, but then they changed the contract unilaterally, which included the billing going up almost 75% with another changes in the ToS. And look I get it, sometimes prices rises, and you can always change providers, so the problem was not that... but the customer service and poor communication. I only notice the change, after my credit card notified my of a higher charge than the ones I'm used to. There was not notification about it in the dashboard. And after a lot of tickets with representatives, they told me under the excuse of "ram / hdd prices are going up" the notice was send through email, and probably gmail mark it as spam... and then the nightmare to cancel begin. After telling them to cancel the account, they told that under the new contract (that I didn't accept) they could only do it if I got charged another extra month, even if from the start you always payed one month in advance, plus paying the setup fee at the beginning. Look I get it, hardware it's messy and prices can go up to stay in business, but this attitude of "I am altering the deal, pray I don’t alter it any further" was the one that made me look for another solutions, and be skeptical about Scaleway despite in paper being a good alternative to Digital Ocean (that let me tell you, DO customer service it's gold in comparison to what I got from online).
- wut42 6y ago
  It's the same, there's no "parent company", Online rebranded as Scaleway. Just a 75% increase ? You've been lucky. They also raised the prices two times since then on the Scaleway IaaS VMs. Stay away from them, I don't see how they could be trusted with pricing again
  - speedgoose 6y ago
    Online rebranded as Scaleway, but there is a parent company called Iliad which is also the parent company of Free.
    - wut42 6y ago
      Yes, but the parent was talking about Online (“I was an online.net customer”)
nly 6y ago
Hetzner have also just announced 5950X servers at €99/mo ($120 USD/mo), bringing Zen 3 to the data center early. The raw power you can get these days for peanuts/mo if you go for bare metal is impressive.
- speedgoose 6y ago
  On AWS for the same price you get nothing but crap.
  - klohto 6y ago
    You get what you pay for. Optimize your architecture and you can do r6gd.4xlarge at $0.3174/hour or ~189€/month. I don’t understand comparing AWS to Hetzner. If you want just bare-metal there are much better clouds.
    - speedgoose 6y ago
      You can't really compare an ARM AWS vCPU to a bare-metal Ryzen 9 core though. And the AWS offer is missing storage and bandwidth, which are extremely expensive if you want something comparable.
      - klohto 6y ago
        That's why I choose the `d` EC2. They come with NVMe SSD ephemeral storage and in terms of bandwidth, AWS will beat it anyway. R6 is around 10Gbps if I remember correctly.
        speedgoose 6y ago
        With 8TB of not throttled IO ?
        klohto 6y ago
        How are you going to throttle local storage on bare-metal exactly? Ephemeral isn't over network, it's directly attached. So yes, even 8TB.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
mobilemidget 6y ago
I clicked this and same time, got an email notification from Scaleway about the exact same thing, what are the odds :)
ponyous 6y ago
I was evaluating scaleway a couple of years ago. I had issues setting up firewall, some kernel errors were thrown when I tried to reconfigure iptables. It seemed like such a basic thing that I completely lost trust in them then.
mrtksn 6y ago
So what's the main value of this? How people are using it? Is it used like a remote DEV machine that you use through remote desktop/SSH? Is it used to host software developed for Mac? Some use case where you need very high bandwidth for your app? It looks cool but I'm having hard time to justify the reason for the existence of the service probably because I never used "Mac on the cloud" and I don't know what I am mission out. Can anyone enlighten me here?
- FrojoS 6y ago
  I assume for development and testing of your Mac app. E.g. if you are not primarily a Mac user and just want to port your Windows app.
  - chiefalchemist 6y ago
    The price feels high for that, yes? Hardward is relatively inexpensive and falling. Put another way, with this "lease" after a year you could have bought and owned the vehicle. Instead, you're committed to another year. That said, I assume there are security advantages to this model. Better control of access, etc.
- purplecats 6y ago
  this got me thinking. instead of buying a new mac every 2 years (about 600$+ a year + transition labor I guess), I would rather just use my current mac, and stream into a VM with the latest mac running on really good hardware and use that as a saas. is this a thing?
  - martinald 6y ago
    Not possible really. MacOS has terrible remote desktop software which is really laggy and generally crap even on gigabit FTTH. They all seem to be based off VNC, instead of something closer to Windows RDP which seems to be a lot smarter in how it sends it over (I cannot notice I'm on RDP most of the time). It also has loads more features (for example, it can change resolution dynamically as you go into full screen instead of being static), handles audio well, etc. I could be wrong on this - would be interested to hear if anyone has had a better experience.
sumanthvepa 6y ago
So what sort of virtualisation do they run on M1 macs? QEMU?
- mikmak 6y ago
  none, it's baremetal servers
stefanjarina 6y ago
Interesting. However I would be way happier if they added openSUSE to their distro offer and present some plan what they are planning to do about centos situation. So far they only have Fedora and CentOS as RPM distros. I do not consider Fedora a server distro and CentOS 8 is finished. Their support is silent for now...
whalesalad 6y ago
Interesting to see a Flash-style loading bar make a return for these sorts of animated UI experiences.
JPKab 6y ago
Just bought a Macbook pro last week, and now I'm wondering if I was a giant moron for steering away from the M1. Just seemed like it was going to cause me a lot of headaches when my target instances are all on x86.
- Beefin 6y ago
  Rosetta is pretty effective, I don't see any significant difference in performance.
mahgnous 6y ago
What is the practical purpose of this though? I can't think of a use case that I would need a mac specifically for. Everything's using containers, I don't know of anyone that is building out mach-o binaries for backend? I don't get it.

362 points by edouardb 6y ago

I am getting an “ Oops, an error occurred!” message. Update: I opened it with Chrome and it works fine. It’s not a “hug of death” as I initially thought. It’s on Safari (iPhone 12 Pro iOS 14.4) that it’s always leading to the error above. In case it’s helpful for the website owners if they see this.

hans1729 6y ago
Works flawless for me, both before and after you commented.
IceWreck 6y ago
I don't see an error message and can view the page but if a hosting company's website can be "hugged to death" then that doesn't exactly inspire confidence in them.
- jiofih 6y ago
  You’re right, everything besides AWS and GCS sucks. Thanks for warning the rest of us /s If it’s only failing in one browser it’s obviously not a capacity issue. Works on my iPhone btw.
pmontra 6y ago
Firefox Android: it works only if I request the desktop site.

hans1729 6y ago

I wonder who precicely this is targeted for. The concept is interesting, but doesn't everyone who develops for macos already have a mac? Or is this actually an economic path with respect to cloud computing?

k_bx 6y ago
Our startup relies on server-side HTML rendering in Headless Chrome, and some ImageMagick image manipulation. Due to how optimised these machines are for this use-case, I do plan to evaluate them to replace the much pricier AWS instances.
- catmanjan 6y ago
  Have you tried browserless.io?
  - k_bx 6y ago
    Thanks, might check it out
- bzb6 6y ago
  I don’t see how those things need a Mac
  - bartvk 6y ago
    But they could have a preference for the platform, no?
  - jiofih 6y ago
    A dedicated x86 machine with equivalent performance for those two tasks is a lot more expensive.
    - gallexme 6y ago
      (if i get it correctly it's mostly cause it's a gpu bound task? (hardware acceleration of the browser engine?)) Back in 2017 hetzner offered gtx1080s for around 70€ a month with 64gb ram and and a 4+ghz quad Intel CPU, n 2x 512gb ssd Im sure these days it's not hard enough to find smth with equilavent processing power in that price range Maybe even direct contact with hetzner could help you out these days(they stopped offering them cause of abuse) And if it's not a gpu bound task but badly concurrently cpu tasks Then maybe a game server specific dedicated hosting (they use consumer CPUs with uo to 5+ghz single core performance) wouldn't also be a lot of money N if its a good concurrency task then the amd CPU offering of hetzner beats all(high memory, insanely fast iops, lots of core) , and has a offering for 5950x these days

IceWreck 6y ago

72 EUR/month. At that price, why not keep them in house ? It would be cheaper.

hkt 6y ago
Scaleway have an API that could realistically be driven through a CI process. Assuming the idea is to do automated testing, and to destroy instances when done, the cost is likely to be pretty low.
- vbezhenar 6y ago
  Apple does not allow renting Macs less than 24 hours.
  - hkt 6y ago
    The page specifies the price is hourly and doesn't seem to list that restriction. Could you please link to where it is specified? Edit: I don't think you're right. I've checked the Scaleway console and it appears the minimum unit of billing for this is one hour. I'd check, but they're out of stock. Second edit: I missed the part where it says 24 hour minimum period on the instance setup page: "As required by Apple License, you must keep this instance at least 24 hours. You will be able to delete it only after 24 hours."
    - dmlittle 6y ago
      Here[1] is the license for BigSur. The relevant section is 3.A.(ii). This clause was added for BigSur so I _think_ that if you're leasing a VPS with macOS Catalina or older you can legally rent it for less than 24 hours. [1] https://www.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/macOSBigSur.pdf https://www.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/macOSBigSur.pdf Edit: It seems that before BigSur the legallity of subleasing macOS was a "gray area". I guess as long as it doesn't hurt Apple they didn't come after you.
      - cromka 6y ago

tomschwiha 6y ago

A product landingpage without any price information is imo a No-Go.

skw-hn 6y ago
The price is in the bubble near the macbook image. 0.10€/h
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jafingi 6y ago
Funny, because the price is in the top most hero section on my computer. €0.10/hour
epaga 6y ago
That's exactly how I feel, which is why I was pleasantly surprised to see "0.10€/hour M1 Mac Mini" right there on the front page.
- vbezhenar 6y ago
  What’s the minimum period?
  - angristan 6y ago
    It's 24h, as requested by Apple's EULA
- doingitwell 6y ago
  That isn’t shown on mobile. Seems like poor design.
  - orangepanda 6y ago
    It's also part of an svg. Is it accessible to screen readers?

hkt 6y ago

That there is a product coup. Impressive. They've still got all the good qualities of a startup but in most meaningful senses they now seem to have the scale and sophistication of offering their global competitors have. Today I'm on the cusp of launching something on there. I used them first for the cheap ARM instances (3eur a month or so) and now for their Kapsule offering. I avoided Amazon, Microsoft and Google out of a sense of moral indignation about their tax affairs. Declaration of interest: I've been using Scaleway for a few years now and really, really like them.

simplecto 6y ago

I’ve been a customer for years and enjoy having access to their team via slack. I recommend giving them a spin— nice to have players other than the big three cloud providers.

hkt 6y ago
Came here to say much the same thing. They're a joy to deal with on Slack.

maga 6y ago

I'm curious about how the hardware side of it all looks. Does Apple sell chips to these cloud providers or they are indeed using real/modified Mac Minis?

teruakohatu 6y ago
I believe it is Mac Minis but I would think they strip them of the case.
- jiofih 6y ago
  The aluminum case is a massive heat sink, no reason to remove it.
  - JCBird1012 6y ago
    If it's already in a cooled data center, removing it could mean being able to fit more Minis in a rack with little downside to thermals. The aluminum case makes sense when you're not in a climate-controlled environment.
IceWreck 6y ago
I saw a video of a mac only data center and they made customized racks to optimally fit real consumer Macs into those racks. They had those for the trashcan/cheese-grator macs, mac minis and well as the all-in-one macs for special use cases (yes they put those all in ones in a rack)
skw-hn 6y ago
They use real retail macs. As for the modifications i don't know.
detaro 6y ago
Using actual Macs is the only way. Apple does not care about helping cloud providers in any way (e.g. even just an exception to the 24h rental requirement would be huge for them, but not even AWS got that).

jedisct1 6y ago

This is amazing!

throw14082020 6y ago

Here are some marketing videos: Scaleway: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZJnrKjfA3s&feature=emb_title https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZJnrKjfA3s&feature=emb_titl... Amazon's Mac Mini: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pn3miC_tTH0&feature=emb_title https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pn3miC_tTH0&feature=emb_titl... Pricing: Scaleway Mac Mini M1: ~$85/month (converted from 70Euro's) MacStadium Mac Mini M1: $109/month Amazon Intel Mac Mini (they don't have m1): ~$26 per day, ~$780/month. Therefore, at NO scale, does Amazon mac mini sense. Amazon's pitch is to help companies reduce their infrastructure problem. Except for every machine you use on Amazon for a month, you could buy a brand new M1 mac mini

christophilus 6y ago
AWS’s margin is Scaleway’s opportunity, you might say.
- dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
  Normally yes, it should be, but I don't think it's going to happen. People have been (1) miscalculating the costs of AWS, (2) realizing they are relatively high but deciding to stick to them for various reasons for a long time now. And because Amazon managed to capture many companies with their marketing, in many cases it's practically impossible to get out.
  - christophilus 6y ago
    Yeah. It was just a snarky play on the famous Bezos quote, "Your margin is my opportunity."
tumblewit 6y ago
Given the ridiculously low power requirement of m1 chips if anyone wants to use these probably in small scale capacities they should just buy it. The power and maintenance won't be that much if a hassle (10 of these would use less than 300w) and you would get warranty too. I think the mac mini m1 was designed (lack of) by apple to replace current mac mini racks but ideally this thing can be as tiny as a 3rd gen apple tv and a rack of 10-20 could be as small as a mac pro ...

Abishek_Muthian 6y ago

I was using Scalway's ARM (Cavium) 2core/2GB instance for a web application (HTML+Minimal Vanilla JS+Go+PSQL) until they suddenly pulled the plug on their ARM instances. I didn't like the way they did it and so I migrated to AWS x86 T2.micro 1core/1GB, but surprisingly the application seems faster here although I think Scaleway had greater network bandwidth. It may be that I didn't use ARM optimized version of PostgreSQL or some other variable I'm missing. But anyways Apple M1 could be more performant than any of the low-mid x86 offering considering the work is optimized for ARM.

jtwigg 6y ago
I recieved plenty of emails in good notice and saw warnings throughout the console about the disconinuation of arm. moving away from arm was easy too.
- Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
  Received the first email in April telling, technical support would end in July and servers pulled out by December. No detail or technical documentation on why they had to do it and just pointed their customers to the migration document. What about those customers who had spent extensive resources on optimising their work for ARM, when they forced a x86 migration? A cloud provider can do better than just 3 months notice. Naturally it was not just me who was unhappy[1]. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22866216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22866216
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Jamieee 6y ago

For what it's worth, I've been using Scaleway for a few years and have had a really great experience. I would absolutely recommend them.

woile 6y ago

Nice to see them on hackernews, I've been using their service for the last 2 months no issue so far. They even have an issue tracker answered by humans for all my inquires. Intuitive UI! Hope they keep growing, it'd be nice if they had some cluster outside europe as well

reconquestio 6y ago

Sounds great, but I will not go for this the second time, Scaleway. Two years ago I purchased a server there, configured everything and started handling workload. Then I received the following email: Our support team created a new ticket associated to your account. Hello, Your instance 'REDACTED' is running on a hypervisor that encountered a critical failure. We are not able to power on the hypervisor again. We were not able to recover your local files located on your LSSD. Your node has been stopped. If you created snapshots of the server's volumes or if you halted your node recently, you will recover your volumes at their latest good state. We are sorry for the inconvenience. Scaleway Team ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

sillysaurusx 6y ago
Problems happen. Did you contact support and ask for a refund? How did they respond? If the PSU failed, there's not a lot they can do to prevent a critical failure. (Sounds like the drive failed in this case.)
- batterylow 6y ago
  > Did you contact support and ask for a refund? How did they respond? How this was resolved is the most important part in my opinion
- Daho0n 6y ago
  >If the PSU failed The PSU? As in one (1)? Because then, to quote Adam Savage, Well there's your problem!
  - morganvachon 6y ago
    Yeah that caught my eye as well. My home media server is a repurposed Dell tower server with redundant PSUs, if I can swing that for non-critical movies and TV shows, surely a large scale cloud provider will have not only redundant PSUs on each node, but their storage will be redundant and rebuildable as well? Else what are their customers actually paying for?
6y ago

xchaotic 6y ago

I signed up to test this and they are already out of capacity. I hope they can keep ordering more quickly...

jimmcslim 6y ago

For Scaleway and Amazon, does Apple ship these Mac Minis in the same packaging as retail, or do they strip it down to something less wasteful at that scale?

tuananh 6y ago
from the images that i saw on the news, aws just shove those M1 mini into the rack.

xchaotic 6y ago

Can anyone recommend a database that already works on the M1 chips?

jarym 6y ago
Not used it on M1 yet but Postgres seems to: https://info.crunchydata.com/blog/postgresql-benchmarks-apple-arm-m1-macbook-pro-2020 https://info.crunchydata.com/blog/postgresql-benchmarks-appl...

ing33k 6y ago

No Nitro... Just a Mac mini this nitro https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/nitro/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/nitro/ ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

MaxBarraclough 6y ago
Is Nitro a problem? It's there to stop users destroying the hardware, and has minimal performance impact.
dx034 6y ago
Isn't nitro mostly AWS marketing? They profit from it as they burn fewer CPU cycles on virtualization for shared hardware. But on dedicated hardware you own everything anyway, so why bother if AWS virtualization runs there? The big difference is support for AWS ecosystem (also partly realized via nitro). You won't get that but for that price difference it's probably still ok.

javchz 6y ago

Anybody knows if Scaleway it's better than the parent company? I was an online.net costumer for a lot of years for a personal project, and a happy one, but then they changed the contract unilaterally, which included the billing going up almost 75% with another changes in the ToS. And look I get it, sometimes prices rises, and you can always change providers, so the problem was not that... but the customer service and poor communication. I only notice the change, after my credit card notified my of a higher charge than the ones I'm used to. There was not notification about it in the dashboard. And after a lot of tickets with representatives, they told me under the excuse of "ram / hdd prices are going up" the notice was send through email, and probably gmail mark it as spam... and then the nightmare to cancel begin. After telling them to cancel the account, they told that under the new contract (that I didn't accept) they could only do it if I got charged another extra month, even if from the start you always payed one month in advance, plus paying the setup fee at the beginning. Look I get it, hardware it's messy and prices can go up to stay in business, but this attitude of "I am altering the deal, pray I don’t alter it any further" was the one that made me look for another solutions, and be skeptical about Scaleway despite in paper being a good alternative to Digital Ocean (that let me tell you, DO customer service it's gold in comparison to what I got from online).

wut42 6y ago
It's the same, there's no "parent company", Online rebranded as Scaleway. Just a 75% increase ? You've been lucky. They also raised the prices two times since then on the Scaleway IaaS VMs. Stay away from them, I don't see how they could be trusted with pricing again
- speedgoose 6y ago
  Online rebranded as Scaleway, but there is a parent company called Iliad which is also the parent company of Free.
  - wut42 6y ago
    Yes, but the parent was talking about Online (“I was an online.net customer”)

nly 6y ago

Hetzner have also just announced 5950X servers at €99/mo ($120 USD/mo), bringing Zen 3 to the data center early. The raw power you can get these days for peanuts/mo if you go for bare metal is impressive.

speedgoose 6y ago
On AWS for the same price you get nothing but crap.
- klohto 6y ago
  You get what you pay for. Optimize your architecture and you can do r6gd.4xlarge at $0.3174/hour or ~189€/month. I don’t understand comparing AWS to Hetzner. If you want just bare-metal there are much better clouds.
  - speedgoose 6y ago
    You can't really compare an ARM AWS vCPU to a bare-metal Ryzen 9 core though. And the AWS offer is missing storage and bandwidth, which are extremely expensive if you want something comparable.
    - klohto 6y ago
      That's why I choose the `d` EC2. They come with NVMe SSD ephemeral storage and in terms of bandwidth, AWS will beat it anyway. R6 is around 10Gbps if I remember correctly.
      - speedgoose 6y ago
        With 8TB of not throttled IO ?
        klohto 6y ago
        How are you going to throttle local storage on bare-metal exactly? Ephemeral isn't over network, it's directly attached. So yes, even 8TB.

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mobilemidget 6y ago

I clicked this and same time, got an email notification from Scaleway about the exact same thing, what are the odds :)

ponyous 6y ago

I was evaluating scaleway a couple of years ago. I had issues setting up firewall, some kernel errors were thrown when I tried to reconfigure iptables. It seemed like such a basic thing that I completely lost trust in them then.

mrtksn 6y ago

So what's the main value of this? How people are using it? Is it used like a remote DEV machine that you use through remote desktop/SSH? Is it used to host software developed for Mac? Some use case where you need very high bandwidth for your app? It looks cool but I'm having hard time to justify the reason for the existence of the service probably because I never used "Mac on the cloud" and I don't know what I am mission out. Can anyone enlighten me here?

FrojoS 6y ago
I assume for development and testing of your Mac app. E.g. if you are not primarily a Mac user and just want to port your Windows app.
- chiefalchemist 6y ago
  The price feels high for that, yes? Hardward is relatively inexpensive and falling. Put another way, with this "lease" after a year you could have bought and owned the vehicle. Instead, you're committed to another year. That said, I assume there are security advantages to this model. Better control of access, etc.
purplecats 6y ago
this got me thinking. instead of buying a new mac every 2 years (about 600$+ a year + transition labor I guess), I would rather just use my current mac, and stream into a VM with the latest mac running on really good hardware and use that as a saas. is this a thing?
- martinald 6y ago
  Not possible really. MacOS has terrible remote desktop software which is really laggy and generally crap even on gigabit FTTH. They all seem to be based off VNC, instead of something closer to Windows RDP which seems to be a lot smarter in how it sends it over (I cannot notice I'm on RDP most of the time). It also has loads more features (for example, it can change resolution dynamically as you go into full screen instead of being static), handles audio well, etc. I could be wrong on this - would be interested to hear if anyone has had a better experience.

sumanthvepa 6y ago

So what sort of virtualisation do they run on M1 macs? QEMU?

mikmak 6y ago
none, it's baremetal servers

stefanjarina 6y ago

Interesting. However I would be way happier if they added openSUSE to their distro offer and present some plan what they are planning to do about centos situation. So far they only have Fedora and CentOS as RPM distros. I do not consider Fedora a server distro and CentOS 8 is finished. Their support is silent for now...

whalesalad 6y ago

Interesting to see a Flash-style loading bar make a return for these sorts of animated UI experiences.

JPKab 6y ago

Just bought a Macbook pro last week, and now I'm wondering if I was a giant moron for steering away from the M1. Just seemed like it was going to cause me a lot of headaches when my target instances are all on x86.

Beefin 6y ago
Rosetta is pretty effective, I don't see any significant difference in performance.

mahgnous 6y ago

What is the practical purpose of this though? I can't think of a use case that I would need a mac specifically for. Everything's using containers, I don't know of anyone that is building out mach-o binaries for backend? I don't get it.