7 ms·

Our biggest GHA fees come from running on MacOS. Do you offer MacOS as a managed service (or plan to?) and how much cheaper is that than GitHub?

HideousKojima 3y ago
Biggest issue with MacOS is that it requires a physical Mac (not virtualization) and IIRC the licening from Apple requires a minimum "rental" period of 24 hours or something like that Edit: the TOS for OS X says this: 3. Leasing for Permitted Developer Services. A. Leasing. You may lease or sublease a validly licensed version of the Apple Software in its entirety to an individual or organization (each, a “Lessee”) provided that all of the following conditions are met: (i) the leased Apple Software must be used for the sole purpose of providing Permitted Developer Services and each Lessee must review and agree to be bound by the terms of this License; (ii) each lease period must be for a minimum period of twenty-four (24) consecutive hours;
- yla92 3y ago
  What I did for work was, getting a Mac Mini and set up multiple self hosted runners in Tmux (very hackish, I know). The builds became faster (and cheaper) because each run no longer had to download the dependencies again. Of course, hosting myself means I also gotta own the uptime of it..
- mysteria 3y ago
  How does Github Actions get away with this? They certainly don't bill and provide the machine for 24 hours for each CI run.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
ozgune 3y ago
Not for the foreseeable future. Ubicloud runs on bare metal providers and they don't lease Mac hardware. Technically, we could run MacOS VMs on arm64. However, our interpretation of Apple's End User License Agreement (EULA) tells us that we can't do this. This repo has some good references on the topic: https://github.com/kholia/OSX-KVM?tab=readme-ov-file#is-this-legal https://github.com/kholia/OSX-KVM?tab=readme-ov-file#is-this...
- dewey 3y ago
  Would something like https://www.macstadium.com https://www.macstadium.com work for your use case?
  - hangonhn 3y ago
    That's exactly what we had looked at but we didn't want to be in the business of maintaining our own instances. We just want to use the GH runner part.
suryao 3y ago
We support GitHub MacOS 13 runners on M2 Pros at WarpBuild [1]. They're about 25% faster and 50% cheaper per minute compared to the equivalent GitHub hosted runners. [1] https://docs.warpbuild.com/runners#macos-m2-pro-on-arm64 https://docs.warpbuild.com/runners#macos-m2-pro-on-arm64
- joshstrange 3y ago
  Nice, I don't think you supported them last I looked. I'll be glad to get off GH's mac runners which are straight garbage, like it's embarrassing or it should be for them. The sheer audacity to charge 10x the linux runners and still be so slow... At 10x price they are 2x+ slower than the linux runners for doing the same thing (checking out repo, installing dependencies, running webpack).
  - suryao 3y ago
    That is correct. We went live with them about a week ago. Will likely introduce it to the HN friends in the next couple of days. I agree with the stuff you've mentioned, obviously, but also empathize a bit with the GitHub folks because of all the licences and limitations Mac runners come with. The perf for comparable operations is squarely on them though.
  - mike_hearn 3y ago
    I'm curious what you need macOS for if you're doing a JS project. Is it Electron?
    - joshstrange 3y ago
      Cross platform app development using JS (TS). Quasar is the framework I use. I build my Android apps on linux but need macOS to build the iOS apps.
      - mike_hearn 3y ago
        Thanks! Hadn't heard of Quasar, looks cool though.

HideousKojima 3y ago

Biggest issue with MacOS is that it requires a physical Mac (not virtualization) and IIRC the licening from Apple requires a minimum "rental" period of 24 hours or something like that Edit: the TOS for OS X says this: 3. Leasing for Permitted Developer Services. A. Leasing. You may lease or sublease a validly licensed version of the Apple Software in its entirety to an individual or organization (each, a “Lessee”) provided that all of the following conditions are met: (i) the leased Apple Software must be used for the sole purpose of providing Permitted Developer Services and each Lessee must review and agree to be bound by the terms of this License; (ii) each lease period must be for a minimum period of twenty-four (24) consecutive hours;

yla92 3y ago
What I did for work was, getting a Mac Mini and set up multiple self hosted runners in Tmux (very hackish, I know). The builds became faster (and cheaper) because each run no longer had to download the dependencies again. Of course, hosting myself means I also gotta own the uptime of it..
mysteria 3y ago
How does Github Actions get away with this? They certainly don't bill and provide the machine for 24 hours for each CI run.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

ozgune 3y ago

Not for the foreseeable future. Ubicloud runs on bare metal providers and they don't lease Mac hardware. Technically, we could run MacOS VMs on arm64. However, our interpretation of Apple's End User License Agreement (EULA) tells us that we can't do this. This repo has some good references on the topic: https://github.com/kholia/OSX-KVM?tab=readme-ov-file#is-this-legal https://github.com/kholia/OSX-KVM?tab=readme-ov-file#is-this...

dewey 3y ago
Would something like https://www.macstadium.com https://www.macstadium.com work for your use case?
- hangonhn 3y ago
  That's exactly what we had looked at but we didn't want to be in the business of maintaining our own instances. We just want to use the GH runner part.

suryao 3y ago

We support GitHub MacOS 13 runners on M2 Pros at WarpBuild [1]. They're about 25% faster and 50% cheaper per minute compared to the equivalent GitHub hosted runners. [1] https://docs.warpbuild.com/runners#macos-m2-pro-on-arm64 https://docs.warpbuild.com/runners#macos-m2-pro-on-arm64

joshstrange 3y ago
Nice, I don't think you supported them last I looked. I'll be glad to get off GH's mac runners which are straight garbage, like it's embarrassing or it should be for them. The sheer audacity to charge 10x the linux runners and still be so slow... At 10x price they are 2x+ slower than the linux runners for doing the same thing (checking out repo, installing dependencies, running webpack).
- suryao 3y ago
  That is correct. We went live with them about a week ago. Will likely introduce it to the HN friends in the next couple of days. I agree with the stuff you've mentioned, obviously, but also empathize a bit with the GitHub folks because of all the licences and limitations Mac runners come with. The perf for comparable operations is squarely on them though.
- mike_hearn 3y ago
  I'm curious what you need macOS for if you're doing a JS project. Is it Electron?
  - joshstrange 3y ago
    Cross platform app development using JS (TS). Quasar is the framework I use. I build my Android apps on linux but need macOS to build the iOS apps.
    - mike_hearn 3y ago
      Thanks! Hadn't heard of Quasar, looks cool though.