AWS opened its re: Invent conference today with a surprise announcement: The company introduces the Mac mini in its cloud. These new Mac EC2 instances, as AWS calls them, are now available in preview. However, they won’t be cheap.
The target audience here, and the only one that AWS is targeting for now, are developers who want cloud-based test and build environments for their Mac and iOS apps. But it’s worth noting that with remote access you get a full Mac mini in the cloud, and I’m sure developers will find all kinds of other use cases for that as well.
Given the recent launch of the Mac mini M1It’s worth noting that the hardware AWS uses, at least for now, are i7 machines with six physical cores and 12 logical cores and 32GB of memory. With Mac’s built-in network options, AWS connects them to your Nitro system for fast network and storage access. This means that you can also attach AWS block storage to these instances, for example.
Unsurprisingly, the AWS team is also working to bring From Apple new M1 Mac minis in your data centers. The current plan is to implement this “early next year,” AWS tells me, and certainly in the first half of 2021. However, AWS and Apple believe the need for Intel machines isn’t going away anytime soon. Especially since many developers will want to continue running their tests on Intel machines for the foreseeable future.
David Brown, The AWS VP of EC2 tells me that these are unmodified Mac minis. AWS has only disabled Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. It helps, Brown said, that the figures fit neatly into a 1U rack.
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“They can’t really be stacked on the shelves; you want to put them on some kind of service sled [and] it fits neatly into a service sled, then our cards and all the different things we need to worry about, from an integration point of view, just fit and just plug it into the Mac mini via the ports it provides. Brown explained. . He admitted that this is clearly a new challenge for AWS. The only way to offer this type of service is to use Apple hardware, after all.
Image credits: AWS
It’s also worth noting that AWS does not virtualize hardware. What you get here is full access to your own device that you don’t share with anyone else. “We wanted to make sure we supported the Mac Mini that you’d get if you went to the Apple Store and bought a Mac mini,” Brown said.
Unlike other EC2 instances, every time you start a new Mac instance, you have to prepay for the first 24 hours to get started. After those first 24 hours, prices are per second, just like any other instance type AWS offers today.
AWS will charge $ 1,083 per hour, billed per second. It’s just under $ 26 to get a machine up and running for 24 hours. That’s a lot more than some small Mac mini cloud providers charge (we’re usually talking about $ 60 or less per month for their entry-level offerings and about two to three times that for a comparable i7 machine with 32GB). of RAM).
Image credits: Ron Miller / Heaven32
Until now, Mac mini hosting has been a small niche in the hosting market, although it has its fair share of players, with companies like MacStadium, MacinCloud, MacWeb, and Mac Mini Vault vying for it. its market share.
With this new offering from AWS, they now face a formidable competitor, although they can still compete on price. AWS, however, argues that it can give developers access to all of the additional cloud services in its portfolio, which sets it apart from all the smaller players.
“The speed at which things happen [other Mac mini cloud providers] and the granularity with which you can use these services is not as fine as what you get with a big cloud provider like AWS, ”Brown said. “So if you want to run a machine, provisioning takes a few days and someone puts a machine in a rack and gives you an IP address to access it and manage the operating system. And usually you pay at least a month, or a longer period, to get a discount. What we have done is that you can literally start these machines in minutes and have a working machine at your disposal. If you decide you want 100, 500 of them, just ask us that and we will make them available to you. The other thing is the ecosystem. All those other 200 AWS services that you can now use with your Mac mini are the other big difference.
Brown also pointed out that Amazon makes it easy for developers to use different machine images and that the company currently offers images for macOS Mojave and Catalina, and that Big Sure support will come “in the future.” And developers can obviously create their own images with all the software they need so they can reuse them every time they start a new machine.
“Today, almost all of our customers need to support an Apple product and the Apple ecosystem, whether it’s iPhone, iPad, or Apple TV, whatever. They’re looking for this bold use case, ”Brown said. “The problem that we really focused on is that customers say, ‘I moved all my server side workloads to AWS, I wish I could move some of these build workflows because I still have minis Mac in a data center or in my office that I need to maintain. I would love to be on AWS. ” “
AWS’s primary launch customers for the new service are Intuit, Ring, and the FiLMiC mobile camera app.
“Mac EC2 instances, with their familiar EC2 APIs and interfaces, allowed us to seamlessly migrate our existing iOS and macOS build and test pipelines to AWS, further improving developer productivity, ”said Pratik Wadher, vice president of product development at Intuit. “We are seeing up to 30% better performance in our data center infrastructure, thanks to elastic capacity expansion and a high availability configuration that operates multiple zones. We currently run around 80% of our production on Mac EC2 instances and are excited to see what the future holds. AWS
New Mac instances are now available in multiple AWS Regions. These include the US East (Northern Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland) and Asia Pacific (Singapore), with other regions to follow shortly.
