Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances
aws.amazon.com
aws.amazon.com
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.
Imagine you’re developing an app in regulated market and need to have Macs for CI/CD There’s a lot more to this than just keeping some Mac mini’s under your desk. How are you managing physical security in your environment? Do you have all the associated certifications in place? Can we see your last audit? Who’s fixing this when something breaks? What about your in house IT folks that done want to build out a whole new operation to manage Macs now? What if next week you need 5x as many instances but only for 2 days? That’s what your paying for in the price here, not just the cost of the instance itself and power.
When faced with all those requirements and challenges the pricing looks inexpensive.
It's great that there are finally multiple ways to do this without needing to buy a bunch of Macs just for compiling.
>>> 699/(24*0.65)
44.80769230769231 days
Nitro card obviously costs a bit, but for ROI on mac itself is closer to 6 weeks than 6 months ;)
But what would be the point of running Linux on a Mac Mini on AWS?
Days where you're doing the same short-lived task many times won't be as expensive per build, but if you just want to do a nightly build, you're paying for months or years and utilizing a fraction of the compute time you're buying.
I would be careful about estimating beyond how they view arm64 given that these are the highest perf/core arm64 devices they can put their hands on.
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.
The most common Mac mini rack mount enclosure holds 2 minis in 1ru. I think at amazon's scale they could probably get 4 minis in 1ru with some custom cooling.
how dense do you think instances are on average in the amazon datacenters?
19 mod 7.7 = 3.6, 3.6 x 1.4 = 5.04 in^2
Presumably the greater waste of bottom side down is in higher number of shelves?
That sounds wasteful to me. Is that really the most common way for mac hosting companies to do it?
There's an image there that appears to have the units mounted sideways for perhaps 6 minis in 2 RU?
So not $699, but $899, since it's 16GB of memory.
Maybe the rules are a bit different for Amazon, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
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You're backpedaling now. Nowhere in your first comment was there any reference to degrees or margins - it was all or nothing (the "price is the price").
It's ok to admit you were mistaken.
That isn’t what you said.
Specifically for testing with multiple versions of MacOS: you could develop the code and then test on a custom AMI to make sure it ran in the version of MacOS, no need to have multiple systems setup. (Although I don't know much about Mac dev-- does Apple provide tools to do such testing already without running multiple OS versions?)
Otherwise, I guess it's all just about convenience.
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.
Not a far leap to speculate that Microsoft/GitHub has been granted early access to that program.
[0] https://seekingalpha.com/article/4466949-new-leak-suggests-a...
[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2021/06/16/apple-planning-to-rival...
Apple has needs for serving 1+ Billion of its customers. IS&T has been known to be a complete pile of crap ( plenty of evidence on HN alone ). A dozens of hiring seems more to me like trying to fix things rather than compete. The will need hundreds if not thousands as bare minimum.
They have been pitting Azure against AWS and GCP against Azure to gain extremely favourable terms.
I don’t know that Apple will be able to make enough server-grade ARM-based chips or server class hardware using their chips, to be able to make a real impact on AWS and Google and Azure. They have never really understood the server market anyway.
I do think they will be able to roll out more of their own data centers for doing some of their most sensitive data processing, and more of the stuff that they consider to be core to their business, in kind of a hybrid/hybrid cloud model, but I think they’re always going to have most of their cloud actually hosted on AWS, Google, Azure, and other cloud providers.
Pure speculation, but Microsoft and Apple have long standing working relationship, in a way that Amazon just doesn't have.
1. https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/30/21348108/apple-amazon-pri...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Apple_Inc.
3. https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/9/18079340/amazon-apple-iph...
The verge article is from 2018, the Apple v Publishers is 2013.
Apple and Microsoft have been collaborating/competing since the 70's.
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.
And Apple licenses their OS to be run under VMware on certain other hardware vendors, too. You just have to ask the right people.
Remember in 1997, Microsoft invested 150 million dollars into Apple to appease regulators? They sold it in 2003 for a tidy 550 million dollars. Nice return on investment!
If they didn't sell it, it would be worth approximately 130 BILLION dollars today.
https://au.finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-founder-bill-gat...
Yeah, many companies will gladly pay an inflated per instance price as long as every else flows smoothly
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.
The leadership sitting on a board with a mandatory retirement age at 65 who is 64 will lobby all involved to change that rule to keep going to 70. The terms are negotiable. You would have to think in our time of climate crisis that using 7 or 8 hours of a 24 hour slot and wasting all that energy for 16 hours is not something the law firm that negotiated the terms would be embarrassed by. To make it right, a regulator could force Apple to limit the rental minimum slot time according a labor board's idea of a programming work day at 7 to 16 hours and not 24. Write a letter and email your politician?
As far as I understand it, those EULA agreements aren't enforceable in the EU.
That being said, NVIDIA don't have any obligation to sell to you in bulk if they find out you're installing consumer GPUs in a datacenter, so there's obviously an incentive to follow them.
For software you can also have person A buy something, then give it to person B who didn't click a license agreement. But this isn't really necessary -- the case where Microsoft got slapped for motherboard locking Windows XP and had to undo it shows that if software is integral to the operation of a device rights to its use are transferred along with the sale of the item, much to the chagrin of CNC companies everywhere who have yet to be challenged on this.
It's relatively common for companies to use shell companies or employees to buy hardware off the record for investigative purposes. Place I used to work at would investigate buyers for this reason (difference being we really did give our customers free reign with the equipment, we just had to try to stop fraud and other things).
You are legally allowed to reverse engineer them and provide your own software but Nvidia pretty much buys whole departments at universities to have the bleeding edge of hardware obfuscation. The stuff they do to make the chips inscrutable is absolutely bonkers.
This is about a minimum 24-hour rental of Mac Minis tho.
From https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/mac/#Pricing:
"Billing for EC2 Mac instances is per second with a 24-hour minimum allocation period to comply with the Apple macOS Software License Agreement"
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.
It's not like Amazon doesn't have the ability or experience to research business decisions before they're made.
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.
CircleCI supports macOS runners and has native support for rerunning failed builds with SSH access. So just setup a job that always fails.
[1] https://github.com/marketplace/actions/debugging-with-tmate [2] https://github.com/marketplace/actions/ngrok-tunnel
I've never really understood Hetzner's offering, I can get paying €2.4 for a quick one off or a once a month build but I don't get how €98 + €49 per additional month is better than buying a Mac Mini on a payment plan.
[1] I believe this is the closest publicly documented effort, and it's a year old: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25064593
"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"
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.
>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.
They were also buying rack mount hardware from other vendors and running VMware on them, too. But I don’t remember what the vendors were that they were buying from. I doubt it would be Dell, given what Michael Dell said about Apple years ago, and the rivalry that has existed ever since. But I don’t know for sure.
(Non affiliate link to a randomly chosen example)
Mac Mini Rack Mount, UCTRONICS 19" 1U Rackmount Supports 2 Units of All Mac Mini M1 and The Previous Models
Outside of Apple, it's just whatever you see them selling on apple.com
with the Apple ecosystem, you get what they give you. There's no other way.
I clearly did something wrong, but the process was so confusing that I couldn't tell you what it was. It probably had to do with running the server at sub-optimal times when rates were higher, but I don't remember reading anything about that. It was a Windows-based game server, so the extra cpu overhead might have had something to do with it.
Considering the huge amount of developers having problems of this kind how hard would it be for AWS to implement a similar system?
Doesn't cost anything, can use different bank accounts for funding on a per card basis, configurable limits.
This is a royal pain in the ass for those of us with hundreds of cards registered through them.
If there was another service of this type that existed, I’d switch to them in a heartbeat. And I will no longer recommend them here.
2: New accounts since around October are already on the new thing.
I don't want to be that guy who yells out from my armchair to say something is easy. But........ quota management at its core is incrementing a number, then reading the number back. AWS is already doing things plenty more complicated than that. I'm sure they could build this if they cared to.
You have to configure (correctly) an AWS IAM account with permissions to run actions you have to specify when budget amounts are hit. There's no simple 'Do not spend more than $X per month' setting. You have to understand AWS's auth and roles to set a limit using an action.
At best you might get some alerts in a timely manner. Good luck.
I had a similar experience as you. You are getting lured in by the free tier, but then this paid additional service is needed and that paid on top. Didn't work for me at all.
Sadly, they don’t turn these things on by default. You have to know about them in advance, and you have to know how to configure them. That’s one thing I wish they would improve.
It is, however, far cheaper and has more transparent pricing.
It's called administrating on whisky ;)
Why does it have that? Because Azure gives away $150/ month Azure credits to students with Visual Studio. If Azure "mistakenly" lets a student spend $5000 it doesn't get to bill their credit card or chase them with debt collectors, those student accounts don't have any money, don't have a credit card, may have no bank account, so long as some institution paid for Visual Studio licenses there may not even be a real human being behind them. So, the only option for Microsoft is to have a water-tight shut off once you spend $150. Added 1TB of SSD to a virtual machine when you meant 1GB? That's gonna burn your $150 real fast. Accidentally picked the turbo-fast Azure SQL instance instead of the toy one you actually needed to demo Power BI? Ditto. But you don't get an enormous bill and then hope they let you off, the credit runs out and everything goes dark instead.
Amazon seems to believe that so few people care about this they don't need to compete. Maybe they're even right. But I, for one, don't want to risk my life savings every time I'm on a screen where a fat-finger costs $5000 per hour, so Azure looks pretty attractive.
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.
More broadly, there's a whole cottage industry of businesses that exist only because the UI for the major cloud providers is terrible. Stuff like security auditing or even telling exactly WTF is going on (let alone over time) is so painful that it's worth paying someone else to provide a better UI. Same for billing.
That's a surprisingly charitable interpretation.
From that perspective, I think it might be ok to say that most eng folk complaining about AWS billing need a safer language (higher level abstraction) where they are protected from causing harm or being harmed.
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.
Because of the potential overhang before the billing system catches up I think it would be appropriate to lower the service quotas on this type of account. I'm not sure if the customer can lower their own quotas which would be an alternate cost control strategy but a beginner wouldn't know to think of that anyway. The solution with billing alerts is good at a company level but too much for a beginner in my opinion.
I know unexpected costs were a concern for me when I started using AWS as a student in 2008 and it is still a concern for people in the same situation, just with so much more complexity on top of it all. It will be a tiny fragment of their revenue but as time goes on a higher and higher level of expertise is required to get started, even though you can accomplish a lot with just the free tier. The amount of progress they've made on this issue in the last 13 years is just not impressive.
They lock your account but keep all the resource active and the bill just keeps going up until you pay to get back in.
It's pretty easy stuff, IMO, but the upside for them is low -- after all they are already #1.
If you don't have your data backed up in something other than Amazon, Amazon is the LEAST of your worries.
As long as Jeff gets richer.
> "selling AWS at a loss" is crisp shorthand for a lot of startups' business models!
Now that I know this complexity, I can't unlearn it. But for everyone else, I would just recommend Digital Ocean, Scaleway or Hetzner.
Everybody knows it's complex to their advantage, they are not stupid - but they can always defend themselves using the flexibility card. I don't believe a class action would ever happen.
[0] https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/mac-mini-m1
Even if I hit the "General Purpose" link on the page I land on, I STILL don't land on a page with $ signs on it.
Seriously, I don't even know where they list the damn pricing anymore.
It used to be listed out plain and simple on the first page you landed on with a region selector.
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)
"Load this specific OS, install these other programs, download some data, get it to this overall state, then run this script and send the output somewhere else, then destroy it when you're done" is actually a pretty big pain to do with macOS, without paying someone. Not that rentable M1 Macs solve that problem, exactly, but rentable, managed Macs in general can be useful for this, when you're renting from places with the automation in place to do easy virtualization or re-imaging.
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.
There really isn’t a cross compiling chain that would allow me to build a macOS app on a freebsd system (for instance) ?
I don't know why Apple cares so much about that, especially since they're already collecting their yearly $100 tax from developers on top of the 30% revenue cut. I guess at their size, extracting every last penny is how you get to a trillion dollar valuation?
So unless you have a strong legal defense ready, you should probably just pay Apple.
EDIT: I should clarify that by "it's not that hard to do", I mean that it's easy because someone else already did the hard part :)
For a small shop it probably makes more sense to just buy the Macs, especially if they do a lot of iOS/OSX development.
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 to do builds.
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
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.
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).