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Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances
- rektide 5y agoSo cool to imagine there's just a regular old Nitro accelerator, but it happens to be plugged in over thunderbolt in this case.
- nicoburns 5y agoThe 24 hour minimum pricing model for these really sucks. My understanding is that this is a condition of Apple's license to Amazon to run macOS on these machines, and I can't work out why they'd do it.
- mcraiha 5y agoI do not understand why Apple hates developers. There are many developers that need Mac machines for CI/CD, but Apple doesn't provide any reasonable solution.
- saagarjha 5y agoApple gives themselves and GitHub special deals, which I guess is what they feel to be a reasonable solution.
- MBCook 5y agoThat’s what XCode Cloud (now in beta for some users) is designed for.
- smoldesu 5y agoHow else are they supposed to force you to buy more units?
- loudtieblahblah 5y agoApple hates it's users. Why should devs be any different?
- reaperducer 5y agoMy guess is that its market research shows that for a profitable number of people, the 24-hour requirement isn't a big deal. It's not like Amazon doesn't have the ability or experience to research business decisions before they're made.
- detaro 5y agoIt's an Apple requirement (it applies to all rent-a-mac type services), I doubt Amazon would mind splitting it shorter (like they do with everything else) if they could.
- willis936 5y agoIt probably helps selling a false narrative to shareholders. "Look at how many hours our hardware was rented for!" with no regard for how many hours were actually spent doing work.
- jermaustin1 5y agoThat makes no sense. Apple doesn't rent hardware.
- detaro 5y agoBecause they want you to buy your own macs.
- jbverschoor 5y agoFor now.. but they'll have their own cloud hosting (xcode cloud is a test). The AWS contract expires soon..
- neilalexander 5y agoThey aren't just firing up a virtual machine on over-provisioned hardware, they're dedicating an entire bare metal machine to you. It is in their interests to make that worthwhile commercially.
- zamadatix 5y agoThese are Apple's terms that Amazon is following, not the other way around. You are getting bare metal that you have to reserve for a minimum of 24 hours because that's how Apple allows it to be licensed not because that's what Amazon thought would make the most sense.
- moondev 5y agoI run VMware esxi on my Mac mini with 64G of memory to create plenty of macos and Linux vms. Are you saying this is against the TOS?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- notinty 5y agoAIUI there's no EULA problems virtualizing macOS on Mac hardware. This is about a minimum 24-hour rental of Mac Minis tho.
- rektide 5y agoI have such a hard time imagining what sick twisting legal crap allows Apple to dictate terms like this. Another example is Nvidia explicitly dis-allowing their consumer GPUs to be used in data-centers. It's wild to me that company's can just make up whatever terms of use they feel like & we have to accept that. Edit: oh hello, i'm at -4! Anyone care to defend your outrage at my outrage? What makes this seem at all ok? This seems so fundamentally screwy to me. Questions like how Apple is allowed to ban other browsers[1] show related type of confusion over the vast ecosystem control that seems to be spreading, but there at least there's some cloudy App Store Apple clearly retains some rights of control over. First-sale rights in America is fairly narrow in what they permit, but in America at least, there's very much been an idea that consumers become owners of the things they buy. It feels like a modern regression that there have been so many asterisks added to this straightforward & obvious right. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29419825 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29419825
- vineyardmike 5y agoI bet a part is that apple genuinely doesn’t want to deal with MacOS being a server OS so they want a little bit of “are you sure?” Requirements in there. A potentially bigger reason (for requiring 24hr) is to incentivize people who need a max for small bursts (eg build server, testing a website with safari etc) to just buy macs. I imagine a reason to require bare-metal hosting because everyone is lauding apple on how snappy and lively the M1 is and if they’re split between N number of VMs then you may have a worse experience and apple is protecting that.
- emodendroket 5y agoYeah, this is huge, especially for hobbyists. The M1 is a great laptop but being freed from buying one just to build for iOS is still cool.
- mmastrac 5y agoYou need to dedicate the instance for a full 24 hours, so if you're doing daily builds you'll probably end up paying for a mac mini every month. Not that I'd ever do or recommend it in a commercial setting, but hobbyists should probably just fire up something like https://github.com/kholia/OSX-KVM https://github.com/kholia/OSX-KVM to do builds.
- mciancia 5y agoMeh, I don't think that too many things that AWS is releasing are at all relevant for hobbyist because of pricing. I n this case, you need to pay at least 16 usd for running this because of 24h limitation, so for example using scaleway (2.4EUR for 24h) or just buying a mac mini probably is gonna be cheaper overall
- SavantIdiot 5y agoNaive question: are these literally closets full of Macs? Or giant m1 MP servers?
- MBCook 5y agoI don’t think Apple would make anything like that so I’d assume racks of Mac Minis.
- sagz 5y agoThey are mac minis: https://d2908q01vomqb2.cloudfront.net/da4b9237bacccdf19c0760cab7aec4a8359010b0/2021/12/01/Mac2-GUI-via-VNC-1024x761.png https://d2908q01vomqb2.cloudfront.net/da4b9237bacccdf19c0760...
- emodendroket 5y ago> EC2 M1 Mac instances are powered by a combination of two hardware components: >The Mac mini, featuring M1 SoC with 8 CPU cores, 8 GPU cores, 16 GiB of memory, and a 16 core Apple Neural Engine. >The AWS Nitro System, providing up to 10 Gbps of VPC network bandwidth and 8 Gbps of EBS storage bandwidth through a high-speed Thunderbolt connection.
- bazhova 5y agoThere was a YT video about a year ago when they first released the EC2 mac instances, and they showed a clip of someone unloading a truck full of mac minis on a forklift. It is really just a bunch of mac minis in a sled. Nothing special going on here.
- DrBazza 5y agoI came here to ask the same thing. So if Apple don't make a rackable M1 server, what do they themselves use? It seems a bit unlikely Apple would have racks of minis as well.
- barkingcat 5y agoInside Apple no one knows (except for Apple employees and contractors, who are bound by employment contracts and nda's) Outside of Apple, it's just whatever you see them selling on apple.com
- speedgoose 5y agoMany months later and more than 5 times more expensive than Scaleway though. https://www.scaleway.com/en/hello-m1/ https://www.scaleway.com/en/hello-m1/
- xeromal 5y agoBut I can do everything I need in one system with AWS.
- speedgoose 5y agoYes, many people find value in being locked down with a single cloud provider. It can make sense, but sometimes you don't need the AWS ecosystem and just need an online server.
- GhettoComputers 5y agoIf you’re testing software on an M1, what is the benefit of AWS?
- ithkuil 5y agoPerhaps you have other stuff on AWS, in a VPC, that is administered by an operations team which is several tickets away from you and/or you have to talk with seven layers of management before you convince anybody that a VPN peering with a cloud provider may be cheaper than the hours you just wasted with expensive meetings just used to discuss the possibility of setting up a VPN peering let alone actually executing it and maintaining it... Yeah, many companies will gladly pay an inflated per instance price as long as every else flows smoothly
- Nextgrid 5y agoI'm assuming there are no data transfer fees. If your M1 workload needs significant data, that alone could make it cheaper than having a cheaper external M1 and then paying every time you move data out of AWS into it.
- nostrebored 5y ago
- tosh 5y ago> EC2 M1 Mac instances are now available in preview in US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon), with other AWS Regions coming at launch. Pricing metrics are similar to the previous generation of EC2 Mac instances. You are charged per hour of reservation of the dedicated host, not for the time the instance is running, and there is a minimum charge of 24 hours for reserving a dedicated host. In the two preview Regions, the on-demand price is $0.6498 per hour. You can save up to 42 percent over the on-demand price with Savings Plans. Check our Dedicated Host on-demand pricing page, as well as the Savings Plans page to learn the details.
- johnthuss 5y agoThis is great, but since x86 Macs were already available this is mostly just a price reduction. But it's great to have these available at Amazon.
- morganvachon 5y agoM1/AArch64 is the future of Mac hardware, this is AWS following the path. Devs targeting the macOS desktop should be focused on M1 native exclusively unless long term support of X86_64 Macs is part of their product's support options.
- jlokier 5y agoI'm fairly sure most Mac users are running non-M1 hardware, and that will continue for a few more years. Even the earliest M1 Air has been out for less time than most people's laptop replacement time, and MBP users are very unlikely to have an M1 MBP yet. Assuming that's correct, exclusively targeting M1 implies ignoring most potential customers for a few years to come.
- johnthuss 5y agoI have to assume the primary use for these VMs is to build iOS applications not Mac apps. For that use case the CPU architecture used to run the build doesn't really matter since the end product is an arm64 iOS app regardless. Sure, you can use it for testing and building Mac apps, but the number of people doing that is minuscule compared to the number of iOS developers (unfortunately).
- dougmwne 5y agoIt’s an interesting look at AWS pricing since the cost of the M1 Mac Mini ($699) and it’s power consumption (avg 26 watts) are known. Based on hardware costs (significant) and power costs (insignificant) you’re looking at a hardware ROI at about 6 months from the $.65 per hour price. AWS has an estimated 60% gross profit margin, so from there it’s probably possible to estimate some other interesting things about their costs, utilization rate and depreciation schedule. Edit: Sorry, my napkin math assumed a unstated utilization rate of 40 hours per week, but that’s not a great assumption due to the 24 hour minimum. Still, some proportion of machines will be idle, though 75% idle seems like a bad guess.
- Megatio 5y agoIts probably much more custom than other hardware. I have never seen any business/professional mac hardware deployment which doesn't look custom build with some magic around it. That alone might be much more expensive and needs a dedicated team.
- markonen 5y agoThe Mac mini itself is not the only hardware cost for AWS here, though: I wouldn't be surprised if their Thunderbolt Nitro hardware cost just as much each. It has to be a very low volume device (relative to other things AWS does).
- Nextgrid 5y agoConsidering Thunderbolt is just PCI-Express, I'd expect it to be standard Nitro hardware (whatever that is) plus an inexpensive PCIe to Thunderbolt board/adapter.
- riknos314 5y agoMaybe, there's still a lot of unknowns. The cost and power consumption of the nitro hardware to translate from the mac mini to everything else being the main one. They're also likely pricing in some form of opportunity cost since the density of physical macs per unit rack space is almost certainly lower than the density of typical server hardware.
- eminence32 5y agoI have an slightly-off-topic question: If I want to test that my opensource project builds and runs on MacOS, what's the cheapest way for me to do this? AWS seems like a fairly expensive way do this at $15 USD per day
- mcphage 5y agoYou don't need to leave the machine running (and billing) 24/7/365—turning it on for a few hours a day when you're building for it, or testing builds, should be enough.
- plorkyeran 5y agoThere's a minimum charge of 24 hours. macOS's license only permits renting the machine to a single buyer per day, so if you use it for five minutes then turn it off that machine is idle for the rest of the day.
- banana_giraffe 5y agoUnlike other EC2 instances, you have to "reserve" a host, and the MAC instances require a minimum of a 24 hour reservation, that you pay for regardless of the instance state. It can be hard to justify $15.60 every time I want to test some random thing. Not to mention I seem to recall you can't actually cancel a reservation till the 24 hour window is up, so you need to remember to stop it the next day, or automate that action somehow.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jffry 5y agoFrom https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/mac/#Pricing https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/mac/#Pricing: "Amazon EC2 Mac instances are available for purchase as Dedicated Hosts through On Demand and Savings Plans pricing models. Billing for EC2 Mac instances is per second with a 24-hour minimum allocation period to comply with the Apple macOS Software License Agreement"
- cehrlich 5y agoGenuinely curious, who is the audience for this? Large iOS dev shops who want hardware to run builds on and don't mind that you need to reserve them for at least 24 hours at a time?
- jenny91 5y agoLarge shops that already run on AWS and where iOS/mac is a small part so they'd rather dish out a few $100k for someone else to manage and have it homogeneous through their other systems.
- ghaff 5y agoAnd it's a standard service that any of their developers can access as needed without needing to either setup their own Macs as a service in a lab or distributing standardized Macs for testing/builds/etc. For a small shop it probably makes more sense to just buy the Macs, especially if they do a lot of iOS/OSX development.
- vineyardmike 5y agoLarge companies who also make their own app… like Amazon. Who are known for selling their own internal tools. ;)
- gotstad 5y agoWell it's anecdotal, but yes, our company fits directly into that space. You might ask why we don't want to just have the hardware in-house, but since we're developing Software as Medical Device products for iOS, we'd rather qualify Amazon as a critical supplier than try to operate the activity ourselves (with all the controls that come with doing so).
- bmj 5y agoMy employer really wants to use this. The IT department dislikes supporting Apple hardware and software. But...we have a product that needs to end up in the Apple App Store. They tried to convince the iOS engineers that it would be fine to work in a virtualized environment (and cheaper), but we really were not convinced that would be workable in the long run. I was willing to give it a shot, but the effort eventually fizzled out, likely over Amazon's costs.
- withinrafael 5y agoGitHub Actions uses VMs. Not sure how they, and not Amazon, were able to pull this off. That subject is sensitive and reportedly under NDA. https://github.com/actions/virtual-environments/issues/2604#issuecomment-967005927 https://github.com/actions/virtual-environments/issues/2604#...
- yakkomajuri 5y agoHope the NDA they referred to didn't have a clause about "not acknowledging the existence of the NDA" that many do. :D
- mike_d 5y agoI believe you are thinking of a NSL (National Security Letter). I've never seen an NDA that compelled secrecy regarding the agreement itself.
- jefftk 5y agoIt is definitely a thing, and I may or may not have signed one
- handrous 5y agoMaybe it's to guard against the possibility of revealing what's covered by an NDA by answering yes or no to increasingly-detailed questions about what is and isn't covered by the NDA?
- mike_d 5y agoSorry I should have been more explicit. I've seen all sorts of dumb shit in NDAs. What I meant to say was I've never seen that kind of language in an NDA drafted by a decent lawyer that expected it to be enforceable. Competent legal council would have the whole thing invalidated because you cannot mount a legal defense to a document you can't acknowledge the existence of in open court. Judges only let that stuff fly when you risk human life or judicial process, not in civil cases.
- retskrad 5y agoThe Apple Silicon is Tim Cook's magnum opus.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- prima-facie 5y agoTo be honest I'm more impressed by the Polly TTS widget at the top. The neural version is incredibly good.
- bogwog 5y agoIf M1 macs were like iPhones, where a new one was released every year, I could see it maybe being useful to pay for something like this. But since they aren’t, and since an M1 mini only costs $699, it doesn’t make sense to me. If you use it 24/7, even the cheapest provider is going to be more expensive than just buying one (or 3) Even if you only use it for building/compiling iOS software, it’s probably still cheaper to buy one because even if Apple releases a new model, the model you can buy today is still going to be good for building for at least half a decade. Also, if there is a new model, the old model will drop in price! AND even if you don’t have the cash to buy a $700 computer, you can still probably find a way to finance the purchase for a lower monthly payment than whatever this type of service would cost. Does anyone have a real world example where a service like this makes sense? (Even if it were cheaper than AWS’s prices)
- mattficke 5y agoCI is what comes to mind. If you want to run tests or build artifacts on a Mac every time any developer pushes a commit, you really need something remote rather than a physical device on your desk.
- Maakuth 5y agoIf you need to run a CI server or something, the cost of the hardware itself is not nearly the only cost you have. With this, you have it hooked up in reliable power supply, very good network connectivity and all the other physical concerns abstracted away.
- cavisne 5y agoThey mentioned the main use case when they launched the initial Mac ec2 instances. Any company that does something on iOS/macos needs mac hardware to run builds on, there is no other (legal) option. The status quo (even at very large companies) is some mac mini's under someones desk/in a closet somewhere. This is basically replacing the cost of that setup (ie the oncall for it/hassle). The AWS service is even more expensive than things like MacStadium because you also get AWS network connectivity and other features.
- 5y ago
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y agoEvery time I look at the AWS prices page or at its control panel, I feel like I need to get a special advanced degree to understand a thing.
- smilespray 5y agoYou're not alone. Feels like it's on purpose.
- chx 5y agohttps://twitter.com/br_/status/979442438254166016 https://twitter.com/br_/status/979442438254166016 > "selling AWS at a loss" is crisp shorthand for a lot of startups' business models!
- jedberg 5y agoThere are entire consulting businesses based on the idea of helping people understand their AWS bill. But I'm not sure what the tradeoff is. They have a lot of services with a lot of options. The pricing is designed to meet everyone's needs.
- PowerfulWizard 5y agoOne thing that would make a difference on small accounts is the ability to do prepaid billing only. That way you define your budget in advance and they enforce it. The problem with the current billing is that people who are new to the system have no hope of understanding what is going on and they have to accept the open-ended nature of the billing system to learn.
- danielheath 5y agoAWS Lightsail is pretty close to this. It’s still possible to get an overage if you have a lot of traffic, but otherwise it’s pretty safe.
- jedberg 5y agoOne issue is what gets shut down when you hit the max? If you have an EC2 instance running and you hit the max, do they shut it off? Would customers understand that and be ok with it? What if you have an S3 bucket? Should they just delete the data? That's probably not what you want. You can basically do max bill now -- you can set up a cloud watch alarm for billing and when it reaches a certain price, run a script. Your script could just shut everything down and delete everything, or do whatever is appropriate for your account. That's their solution to this. Also they don't have instant feedback on usage -> cost. They batch process it. So if you get a huge spike in usage, AWS may not even know that for a while. They could in theory be willing to eat the cost of usage between it happening and their processing, but are probably unwilling.
- savant_penguin 5y agoIgnoring the actual news for a moment, this Amazon polly text to speech is absolutely fantastic
- deeblering4 5y agoAnd in just 3 months you could have purchased an M1 Mac outright!
- ridiculous_leke 5y agoI am far away from Appleverse. Can anyone tell me few usecases for M1 EC2 instances?
- facorreia 5y agoBuild automation, test automation.
- pkpioneer 5y agoReport claims Amazon collects over a third of seller revenue, bringing in $121B in 2021 A new study claims that Amazon makes far more from fees on its Marketplace platform than even the cash cow known as AWS. The report says that Amazon’s fees for participating effectively on its store have grown to the point where sellers now give the company about 34% of their earnings https://pkpioneer.blogspot.com/2021/12/report-claims-amazon-collects-over.html https://pkpioneer.blogspot.com/2021/12/report-claims-amazon-...