4 ms·
Apple has not failed with the mini because it never tried for this sort of thing in the first place - it is a happy accident. And one that I believe they notice
by recuter 14y ago
Apple has not failed with the mini because it never tried for this sort of thing in the first place - it is a happy accident. And one that I believe they noticed and allowed to go on organically with the bare minimum of effort on their part.
The reason collocating minis is intriguing is this: This consumer grade hardware has gotten so reliable and powerful that it makes for a very good server - being a consumer SKU means it has a production run orders of magnitude greater than a Dell server for example.
Thus a Mini is disposable. It is almost like a Raspberry Pi.
A proper server will obviously be more bang for the buck in terms of raw hardware specs, but the TCO of a Mini is favorable because you can resell it and it has a good, none-enterprise-y warranty.
A fully loaded Mini amortized comes out to something like $50/month. It also blows EC2, 'etc, completely out of the water.
In the rather rare case of it failing it is simply swapped out by the facility with exactly equivalent hardware in short order while yours gets handed off to Apple Care, at which point you can simply ebay it for 70%+ of its original price and get a brand new one switched back, all in a matter of a day or two. If you need to "spin up" more, there are always more laying around that can be provided by the facility immediately. Dedicated hardware that is so flexible and convenient is a powerful thing. Depending on your use case you could get away with running on just a couple of minis and save quite a lot of money.
If you buy them in threes for redundancy Apple offers nice discounts and financing. You want to compare how much performance you get out of three minis for $200/mo (total) to what that would cost you on Heroku?
Oh and I'm pretty sure you can boot linux from an SD card or some such.
- alrs 14y agoApple failed in the server market. They have had success with the Mini. A Mini is cheaper than EC2, but that isn't the point of EC2. You don't run in EC2 because it is cheap or performant, you run there because you can spin up virtual machines quickly. You run there because it is adjacent to S3. You run there becuase it integrates with the likes of RDS, ELB, and Route 53.
- recuter 14y agoIt depends on your use case of course. If you spin up dozens of instances all the time then sure - but keep in mind that an email like "put another mini in my rack" gets executed in a few hours and is equivalent to quite a lot of compute units. That's rather the point, even very large spikes in growth can be swallowed by just a few of these in theory and certainly there are always enough Minis in close proximity such that it makes no difference.
- alrs 14y agoI disagree. EC2 is inherently unreliable, and so are consumer-grade desktops like Mac Minis. The strategy in EC2 is to be able to spin up replacements very quickly when your instances fail. The only strategy for a non-power-redundant, non-RAID, no-IPMI Mac Mini failure is the same, except replacement is measured in minutes or hours instead of seconds. This is huge.
- derefr 14y agoIf you're running above-capacity, a single failure of a box in any working set (routers, database shards, app servers, etc.) doesn't matter. Just wait the few hours and let the rest of your boxes silently absorb the load. If you're running exactly-at-capacity: why? (This presumes, though, that you're Highly Available enough to begin with that one node lost is a quantitative, not qualitative, failure in your system. If you only have one app server, time-to-reprovision is the least of your worries.)
- equalarrow 14y agoThis is absolutely true. I have a 16GB dedicated mini with ssd and 8 cores for $130/mo. There's no way I could get anything that cheap and powerful from Rackspace or Amazon. I plan to follow suit with more of the same.
- jiggy2011 14y agoA mini might be cheaper than EC2, but is it cheaper than commodity x86 hardware?