4 ms·

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
        Catalina is not available for M1, though.
  - usrusr 6y ago
    Makes me wonder how they draw the line between renting a Mac and providing a service which happens to run on a Mac. I guess I know the answer (arbitrarily).
vbezhenar 6y ago
AWS charges $26 per day. Someone buys those.
- beagle3 6y ago
  What you pay for in AWS is access to the entire ecosystem, and cheap internal bandwidth to the rest of the AWS customers. Scaleway offers neither. Their competition is Linode and Digital Ocean. But at 72eur/month for M1, you could buy it in a year so it’s actually a reasonable price. Unlike AWS if all you need is compute.
  - ddorian43 6y ago
    > cheap internal bandwidth This is vendor lockin that AWS put you in and now you mention like it's a pro.
    - beagle3 6y ago
      It’s network effect, not vendor lock-in. If you are doing B2B, chances are good your peers are also in AWS, regardless of the lock-in effects of other Amazon services (which are real, and like any lock-in are always negative). I am old enough to have collocates at Exodus in 2000 for the exact same reason: everyone I needed to work with collocates with them. (The later went bankrupt and became Savvis, no idea what they are called today or if they still exist)
      - Dylan16807 6y ago
        Even if 90% of your peers are in Amazon, the egress fees on the other 10% cost more than sending all of your data over a competitively priced network connection. And that's the best case, where all your connections to them start and end in the same availability zone. Just inter-AZ fees cost more than you'd normally pay for transit. It's almost entirely lock-in.
      - fomine3 6y ago
        network effect, literally.
jsnk 6y ago
I am interested in hosting my own server, but I am not sure how to go about setting one up. Does anyone know a guide on this topic?
tempay 6y ago
At that price it takes about a year to pay for the hardware. Factoring in the cost of hosting the hardware it seems reasonable (macstadium charges 30-70 EUR a month for colocation alone). It's still not cheap if you can ignore the hosting cost and need it for several years but it's way cheaper than using AWS for intel mac minis.
- imtringued 6y ago
  You can probably stop renting on the weekend and if you have an app with infrequent updates you don't need to pay every day. With the right workflow it is definitively cheaper than buying.
bartvk 6y ago
I'm working for a customer whose IT only really deals with Microsoft. We as iOS developers had an internally set up build server but it's unused right now, because everybody works remote and it's behind the corporate mote. This Scaleway offering would work much better.
lmilcin 6y ago
You want dusty Mac Mini laying under desk somewhere which if fails will put your entire operation on pause for couple of days? There might be valid business uses for that, but for a company that invested a huge amount of money in a team of developers and then pays them through the nose for every hour whether they work or not and maybe have clients that count on updates, that is simply not acceptable. Also many companies choose to have their entire infra in the cloud and then it doesn't make sense to spend effort to integrate one physical machine.
- cbKSF 6y ago
  The failure rate of single machine setups is way overrated (also, you could have several machines of course). We need decentralization, smaller providers like Hetzner and also in-house IT.
  - lmilcin 6y ago
    It is not failure rate, it is the cost if it happens. I work for large corporations and the calculations are entirely different from what a small, cash strapped startup would be doing. For example, if you work on a new product and it would take 1 day to get Mac Mini for free vs you would be paying for cloud solution 1000 dollars daily but get it one day sooner, it might still be well worthwhile to get cloud version. Because if you think about it, it is possible that Mac Mini would be holding up your product development for one day, then you calculate how much you hope to earn from that product daily and how much you are loosing while you haven't launched and then it is no brainer. As I said, it depends on business case. For some, the cost of this M1 VM is not going to be any factor in the decision. Have you seen how expensive GPUs are in the cloud? Have you seen how many clients are that pay for huge farms of these?
tyingq 6y ago
You could get a rackmount kit and then ship it to a hosting company: https://www.sonnettech.com/product/mac-mini-mounting-solutions/enclosures.html https://www.sonnettech.com/product/mac-mini-mounting-solutio...
dagw 6y ago
Getting in-house IT to host a machine in their(our?) on-site data center would cost my department a lot more than 72eur/month, and that is before I pay for the hardware.

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
      Catalina is not available for M1, though.
- usrusr 6y ago
  Makes me wonder how they draw the line between renting a Mac and providing a service which happens to run on a Mac. I guess I know the answer (arbitrarily).

vbezhenar 6y ago

AWS charges $26 per day. Someone buys those.

beagle3 6y ago
What you pay for in AWS is access to the entire ecosystem, and cheap internal bandwidth to the rest of the AWS customers. Scaleway offers neither. Their competition is Linode and Digital Ocean. But at 72eur/month for M1, you could buy it in a year so it’s actually a reasonable price. Unlike AWS if all you need is compute.
- ddorian43 6y ago
  > cheap internal bandwidth This is vendor lockin that AWS put you in and now you mention like it's a pro.
  - beagle3 6y ago
    It’s network effect, not vendor lock-in. If you are doing B2B, chances are good your peers are also in AWS, regardless of the lock-in effects of other Amazon services (which are real, and like any lock-in are always negative). I am old enough to have collocates at Exodus in 2000 for the exact same reason: everyone I needed to work with collocates with them. (The later went bankrupt and became Savvis, no idea what they are called today or if they still exist)
    - Dylan16807 6y ago
      Even if 90% of your peers are in Amazon, the egress fees on the other 10% cost more than sending all of your data over a competitively priced network connection. And that's the best case, where all your connections to them start and end in the same availability zone. Just inter-AZ fees cost more than you'd normally pay for transit. It's almost entirely lock-in.
    - fomine3 6y ago
      network effect, literally.

jsnk 6y ago

I am interested in hosting my own server, but I am not sure how to go about setting one up. Does anyone know a guide on this topic?

tempay 6y ago

At that price it takes about a year to pay for the hardware. Factoring in the cost of hosting the hardware it seems reasonable (macstadium charges 30-70 EUR a month for colocation alone). It's still not cheap if you can ignore the hosting cost and need it for several years but it's way cheaper than using AWS for intel mac minis.

imtringued 6y ago
You can probably stop renting on the weekend and if you have an app with infrequent updates you don't need to pay every day. With the right workflow it is definitively cheaper than buying.

bartvk 6y ago

I'm working for a customer whose IT only really deals with Microsoft. We as iOS developers had an internally set up build server but it's unused right now, because everybody works remote and it's behind the corporate mote. This Scaleway offering would work much better.

lmilcin 6y ago

You want dusty Mac Mini laying under desk somewhere which if fails will put your entire operation on pause for couple of days? There might be valid business uses for that, but for a company that invested a huge amount of money in a team of developers and then pays them through the nose for every hour whether they work or not and maybe have clients that count on updates, that is simply not acceptable. Also many companies choose to have their entire infra in the cloud and then it doesn't make sense to spend effort to integrate one physical machine.

cbKSF 6y ago
The failure rate of single machine setups is way overrated (also, you could have several machines of course). We need decentralization, smaller providers like Hetzner and also in-house IT.
- lmilcin 6y ago
  It is not failure rate, it is the cost if it happens. I work for large corporations and the calculations are entirely different from what a small, cash strapped startup would be doing. For example, if you work on a new product and it would take 1 day to get Mac Mini for free vs you would be paying for cloud solution 1000 dollars daily but get it one day sooner, it might still be well worthwhile to get cloud version. Because if you think about it, it is possible that Mac Mini would be holding up your product development for one day, then you calculate how much you hope to earn from that product daily and how much you are loosing while you haven't launched and then it is no brainer. As I said, it depends on business case. For some, the cost of this M1 VM is not going to be any factor in the decision. Have you seen how expensive GPUs are in the cloud? Have you seen how many clients are that pay for huge farms of these?

tyingq 6y ago

You could get a rackmount kit and then ship it to a hosting company: https://www.sonnettech.com/product/mac-mini-mounting-solutions/enclosures.html https://www.sonnettech.com/product/mac-mini-mounting-solutio...

dagw 6y ago

Getting in-house IT to host a machine in their(our?) on-site data center would cost my department a lot more than 72eur/month, and that is before I pay for the hardware.