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Amazon's EC2 Service to Offer M1 Mac Mini Instances for Faster Build Times

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Amazon today announced that its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service is now offering a "preview" of M1 Mac mini instances in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) regions of U.S. East and U.S. West, with other regions to be available when the instances are fully released.

aws-ec2-m1-mac-mini.jpg

An "instance" is a virtual server available for rent through Amazon's EC2 service for running apps on AWS infrastructure. Intel-based Mac mini instances were already available since last year, but M1 models will provide improved performance, allowing developers building apps for the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Apple TV to benefit from faster builds.

From the announcement:
If you are a Mac developer and re-architecting your apps to natively support Macs with Apple silicon, you may now build and test your apps and take advantage of all the benefits of AWS. Developers building for iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Apple TV will also benefit from faster builds. EC2 M1 Mac instances deliver up to 60% better price performance over the x86-based EC2 Mac instances for iPhone and Mac app build workloads.
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More details are available on the Amazon Web Services website and there is also a sign-up form for the M1 Mac mini instances preview.

Article Link: Amazon's EC2 Service to Offer M1 Mac Mini Instances for Faster Build Times
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2021/12/02/amazon-ec2-m1-mac-mini-instances/
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DCYorke said:
Isn't it still ridiculously priced though? Like you have to buy a full month and that costs more than buying a machine.
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I am guessing you didn't read the linked page. You don't have to buy a full month - the minimum on-demand reservation length is a full day. At the quoted on-demand rate of $0.6498 per hour, that'd be $15.60.

If you use one of their longer term savings plans, you'd be able to cut that rate by 25%-75%.
 
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Westside guy said:
I am guessing you didn't read the linked page. You don't have to buy a full month - the minimum on-demand reservation length is a full day. At the quoted on-demand rate of $0.6498 per hour, that'd be $15.60.

If you use one of their longer term savings plans, you'd be able to cut that rate by 25%-75%.
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That makes it a lot more palatable!
 
It would be fun to see how fast a .NET 6 web app can run on an M1 Mac EC2 instance.

EC2 storage options may slow things down quite a bit though. I’m pretty sure AWS keeps all data storage completely separate from the actual server hardware.
 
DCYorke said:
That makes it a lot more palatable!
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I'm not sure what the use case would be, though, for most developers. Maybe if you're just getting your feet wet, or if your an Android developer who has one specific app you want to port to iOS?

Note: I am not an app developer. I'd be curious to hear an opinion from someone who makes a living at this.
 
Nice to see this. Could be useful for those that don't want to give up their Intel Macs who either invested thousands into a Mac Pro or (like myself) still need a device that can dual boot x64 Windows.
 
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I’m not working in the industry so no idea how many server farms actively uses ARM processor, but I’d guess Apple fan would be very happy if somehow amazon/Microsoft migrates a good portion of their own sever farm into apple silicon Mac.
 
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Shirasaki said:
I’m not working in the industry so no idea how many server farms actively uses ARM processor, but I’d guess Apple fan would be very happy if somehow amazon/Microsoft migrates a good portion of their own sever farm into apple silicon Mac.
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Extremely unlikely. the vast bulk of Amazon/Microsoft (and other major players) cloud services all runs on top of Linux; not macOS. Apple silicon does very , very , very of anything uniquely significant in a cloud service workload based on Linux. Not even a vendor supported configuration ( Linux on Apple Silcion).

What Amazon is offering here is a niche service; not a bulk service. Most likely folks who might need 2-3 Minis who are already also using much larger number of Linux serves will just fire up a few add-ons in their space. It is incrementally more money for Amazon / Microsoft /etc. It is not their baseline.


So far Apple has provided no hardware to support the primary DPU/IPU/SmartNIC cards that are the core of the primary virtualiaation offerings these days for modern large scale shop. ( DPU -- data processing units (Mellanox/Nvidia and some others use the term) . iPU -- infrastructure processing units ( Intel term mainly so far) , SmartNIC -- most of the rest of the very high end data center NIC providers. ). If most of the data is stored on a virtualized network it pays to offload all of that into a separate system (usually on a card) to free up resources from the CPU. Similar with serveral other virtualization tasks ( virtual NVMe storage access, virtual network switch , etc. )

There is a ton of hand waving being done about how Apple has some cloud solution in the M-series SoC offerings. In general, they do not. The narrow corner case where they do is with macOS licensing for virtual hosting. For most part , Apple has geared the licensing so that it is general, "off the shelf" Macs that get rented out. ( not super custom , open compute style hardware ).

Eventually Apple's XCode Cloud will compete with what Amazon is doing here on the narrow macOS tasks (run macOS software ). But likely will be a more even playing field when all of the cloud services vendors are just offering Minis and "Mac Pro" racked up and rented per day.
 
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DCYorke said:
Isn't it still ridiculously priced though? Like you have to buy a full month and that costs more than buying a machine.
Click to expand...

The "per day" is part of the modern/latest macOS License. That isn't particularly Amazon the main driver there.

Apple is mainly interested in cloud services vendors just consuming up the same system "stock inventory" that they sell into the retail channel. It is more "rent a Mac" than super high density multi-tenant packing onto a high end, server room specific hardware.
 
deconstruct60 said:
Extremely unlikely. the vast bulk of Amazon/Microsoft (and other major players) cloud services all runs on top of Linux; not macOS. Apple silicon does very , very , very of anything uniquely significant in a cloud service workload based on Linux. Not even a vendor supported configuration ( Linux on Apple Silcion).
Click to expand...

You win the "I used the most acronyms today and sound like an insider" award.
 
Still 5 times more expensive than other options, but if your infra is in AWS, it's a good option.
 
AWS have been offering Macs for a little while now and it's been an opportunity to move those XCode build servers to the cloud. Not surprising they are going for M1 Macs also as they have also been pushing cheaper ARM based regular instances aimed at running Linux.
 
Westside guy said:
I am guessing you didn't read the linked page. You don't have to buy a full month - the minimum on-demand reservation length is a full day. At the quoted on-demand rate of $0.6498 per hour, that'd be $15.60.

If you use one of their longer term savings plans, you'd be able to cut that rate by 25%-75%.
Click to expand...
Still too expensive. I was expecting $5 a month or less.
 
I think some may be missing the point of having the Macs in the AWS VPCs, up there you don't have to route build triggers to devices on your site. I used to have a setup with a Jenkins server in an AWS VPC getting a webhook which then had to call back generating another webhook over our office routes to one of our sites to another pair of Mac Minis, that could then check out the code to build it.
Having Macs up there means you can add one at any point and you don't need any of this extra complexity. It's worth it for many development squads.
 
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