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Comment by alrs | Hacker News Reader

I remember reading articles like this about technologies and companies that I was excited about.

In the late 80s the stories were: "The Apple // is still relevant." It wasn't. I remember OS/2 fans pointing to "huge deployments in banking", "huge in Brazil", and "every ATM machine is running OS/2." Whatever truth was there was irrelevant, as IBM had given up on OS/2.

Apple has given up on selling a server operating system. Apple has given up on selling server hardware. Apple failed.

A cluster of minis makes sense if you are running a CI build farm for an OS X application. It probably makes sense if you're building a FCP render farm. In both of these cases, note that it only makes sense because of the licensing issues. In a saner world you would be running on commodity x86 hardware.

If you are an Apple fan and find yourself arguing that your employer should be using piles of minis-running-Linux based on this article, don't.

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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.

This 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.

A mini might be cheaper than EC2, but is it cheaper than commodity x86 hardware?

Apple 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.

It 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.

I 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.

If 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.)

What is a "server" operating system exactly ?

Because there is nothing inherently different between CentOS on the desktop and on the server for example.

I think most open source people would say an server os is one without a GUI. People are forgetting Windows Server is still largely the same as Windows on the desktop.

Windows Server has a ton of features not present in the desktop versions. For example IIS running on a Windows 7 desktop is capped at 10 concurrent connections for licensing reasons.

Whereas I could install a desktop distro + apache on my server and serve as many requests as the hardware can physically handle. The only difference would be that default settings would probably not be well optimised for that use case, but some reconfiguration would solve that.

That's not really true. The current version of Windows Server by default has no GUI (and almost no services). It's configured completely from the command line (or if you follow Microsoft's guidance, remotely via powershell remoting).

I certainly wouldn't recommend any shops currently using Linux servers to switch them out, but Windows Server has come a ridiculously long way from being super sucky to being a good server operating system.

That must be new. It's been a few years since I've used windows server.

Yeah, Gui-less was an option on Server 2008, but not the default. The default for 2012 is what they call "server core" (no GUI, no desktop services).

I was surprised when I took a look at Windows Server recently. I'd sort of mentally written it off a decade ago, but Microsoft has done a commendable amount of work in improving it.

Again, I don't think there's anything about it that I'd tell current Linux admins to swap out their servers for (even ignoring the license costs), but they've improved Windows Server enough that I no longer recommend that existing folks abandon it.

Also, for what it's worth, Powershell is quite possibly the best thing Microsoft has come up with in 20 years. Yes, it's embarrassing that it took that long to get Windows command-line administration to what Unix people have been doing since the 70's, but they've implemented it in a genuinely smart way.

Unix people, AIX had CDE but no one used it, same for Solaris last time I checked it, but it was a couple of years ago.

Apple runs massive datacenters. Because they own OS X, they can run it on whatever hardware they want.

Is Apple running OS X in its datacenters? My understanding is that they are not.

A server OS is manageable, can be run headless, and is performant in server workloads.

I have never heard anyone argue that OS X can compete on any performance metric with Linux or FreeBSD.

I'd put money on them using a lot of Linux like most sane data center operators do.

One good test is if they have a decent track record on pushing CVE fixes. Apple tends to hold theirs to about once a quarter unless something is in very common use. They intentionally hold them back so that people don't have to click update too often.

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