Yeah I know. When I last used them, macminicolo was still operating as a separate entities despite Macstadium buying them out. They probably finished merging.
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Apple Developers Now Able to Natively Run macOS Within AWS With Amazon EC2 Mac Instances
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Yeah I know. When I last used them, macminicolo was still operating as a separate entities despite Macstadium buying them out. They probably finished merging.
I was talking about colocation where you own the hardware. It's $89/mo for the 2018 models but for older gen (which the 2012/2014 are still a very capable machines to run as servers, macstadium will even install new SSDs for you) it's only $34/mo.
I remember emailing sjobs when I worked at Apple (Mac OS X Server group) about 'cloud hosted' Mac desktop. Of course I didn't get a reply. Over 15 years later, we might actually get there.
If this gets extended to Amazon Workspaces... how cool.
I know, I know... desktops are so passé. I'll take a desktop experience over smart devices any day.
If this gets extended to Amazon Workspaces... how cool.
I know, I know... desktops are so passé. I'll take a desktop experience over smart devices any day.
Me too, and i really want to understand.
Supposing that i’ve a macbook with no good specs to run Lightroom (and it is...),
basically, can i rent a “Mac machine” with a pay-as-you-go daily fee just when occasionally i need to render a photo?
So, given that i’ve an already-paid Lightroom license, the scenario is that i have “just” to pay a daily fee for AWS?
Came here to express surprise and delight, but instead I’ve got the all too familiar disappointment setting in already.
Definitely explains the 10 Gbe variant of the logic board in Apples Systems that was leaked the other week. These will be used at Amazon for sure.
All wee need now is some native Mac docker images we can run on ECS with EC2 or Cloud Build.
Remote build systems that'll integrate into a lot of devs existing AWS deployments, including roles, VPCs, etc? sweet!
Good bet, also possible they'll just use TB to branch to a NIC/NICs elsewhere in their racking system either instead of or in additon to a native 10Gbe port, they're prob going to want some sort of redundant connections as well as probably some sort of custom LOM in their build outs
Also interested. I’m not too savvy on this front and this is all still a mystery to me (hopefully someone will come along and give a deeper insight).
Although your example sounds like not quite the use case. Rendering a photo it probably takes longer to send the image or images themselves to the instanced server, unless the processing part of each takes very long.
I think it is more in the sense of having a computer’s resources do specific tasks, these tasks wouldn’t really require constant visual feedback (i.e. using photoshop remotely there wouldn’t be an ideal use case) and you queue them up for the server to process. I can mostly think of build machines that monitor a git repository and for every push they detect they try to make a build of the project and put the generated application in folder for the remote user to download and check.
In the sense of a standard “server”, like hosting a webpage or routine that waits for requests, I still don’t know how this world works.
That isn't how it works, at all.
Docker is fundamentally dependent on the Linux kernel.
Docker containers *of* MacOS, as the OP suggested, would be nice, and totally doable in theory, if Apple would allow it. Not all Docker containers are Linux, you can even use Windows as a Docker container (https://hub.docker.com/_/microsoft-windows), Docker is not dependent on the Linux kernel.
Docker has Windows images for running Windows applications, unless I am very much mistaken when running Windows apps in containers. From microsoft/nanoserver or microsoft/windowsservercore.
Yup, we already use Docker for Linux and Windows. Adding macOS to the mix would let us start up automated builds for just about every platform. Send a project up, have 7 instances spin up and compile it, then put the result into a S3 bucket. Congrats dev, you now have a game built for every platform you are pushing on (expect Switch, PS, and xBox, but those are all kinds of hurt.)
Yes, so all we need is an Apple Silicon macOS Big Sur Docker kernel! That would be awesome! Apple would have to work with Docker. Any chance of this happening?
Would be great in conjunction with Jenkins and such to create ephemeral MacOS spin ups to build on existing systems!
After some reading, I see what you're talking about.
So I stand by what I said, in the context of what the OP suggested. Containers are inherently tied to the kernel of the host OS. You can't host a Linux container on windows or macOS, because they dont run the linux kernel. This is why they run in a VM - even if that VM is transparent to the user, it's still there.
Microsoft added APIs to Windows, to allow it to host "containers" in a similar fashion to the Linux kernel, so you can have a "windows container", but again, it's tied to the windows kernel so it has to be hosted on a windows host.
So the only way you'd get "macOS images" to "run on ECS" is if (1) Apple added container hosting capabilities to XNU (the kernel used by macOS) (2) Apple changed their EULA *again* to allow hosting containerised instances and (3) Amazon adapted the software running ECS to also work on macOS, and provided this service.
So it's not just "if Apple would allow it".
It seems I was not clear enough. I am hoping for macOS containers on macOS, the same as we have Windows containers on Windows server. Cross platform would be all lovely, but that wouldn't be Docker.
Right, that part wasn't clear.
Given the most recent changes to EULA related to running macOS in a DC, I doubt you'd get the benefits you want.
My guess is it’ll come sometime around next fall when the next step up (8+4 CPU?) for the SoC is released. The same chip that goes into 16” MBP and iMac will also be available in the mini. That mini will have 10GbE option.
But aren't these AWS MacOS offerings running on "bare metal" rather than running as virtual servers? I don't know, by the way, just asking the question because that's how the instances are described on other sites.
For the OP, most cloud server offerings spin up "Virtual Machines" to a customer's requirements. For instance, our company rents a ton of cloud servers from Microsoft Azure. Want a copy of Windows 10 running on an Azure Server somewhere? No problem, what you see is a virtual Windows 10. That virtual instance could in fact be "living" on a Windows 2016 Server physical box, but you'd never know. Similarly, I have VMWare Fusion installed on my MacBook. Living inside that is a copy of Windows 10. As far as Windows 10 is concerned, it is living on a PC, albeit one described as a virtual PC. At the end of the day, my copy of Windows 10 is represented on my MacBook as a file, which is pretty neat. That file represents the operating system, all installed Windows apps, a virtual filing system, networking etc.
If the bare metal description is accurate, AWS have provisioned a large stack of physical Apple computers and a customer can lease a particular one for a day or more. Which is rather different to provisioning virtual servers on demand.
Happy to be corrected on this. I'd like to know for sure myself.
Yes, they're physical Mac mini's, just like MacStadium offer, but a **** load more expensive.