Bare-metal Macs-as-a-service come to AWS. Intel for now, M1 silicon in 2021
- Reference: 1606799086
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/12/01/bare_metal_macsasaservice_come_to/
- Source link:
The Amazon division [1]said the new instances are Mac Mini computers running macOS 10.14 (Mojave) or 10.15 (Catalina) and pack an 8th generation, 6-core (12 vCPU) Intel Core i7 (Coffee Lake) processor running at 3.2 GHz, with Turbo Boost up to 4.6 GHz. 32GB of RAM awaits. Only Elastic Block Storage can be used with the instances.
“Mac instances are dedicated, bare-metal instances which are accessible in the EC2 console as dedicated hosts,” according to Amazon’s [2]listing of EC2 instance types .
The macOS instances are accessible over SSH or as a VNC remote desktop. “The AMIs for EC2 Mac instances are EC2-optimized and include the AWS goodies that you would find on other AWS AMIs: An ENA driver, the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), the CloudWatch Agent, CloudFormation Helper Scripts, support for AWS Systems Manager, and the ec2-user account,” says AWS’ announcement. Amazon’s Nitro security and isolation layer is also present.
Who cares what Apple's about to announce? It owes us a macOS x86 virtual appliance for non-Mac computers [3]READ MORE
AWS suggests the instances as a development environment for jobs like “Developing, building, testing, and signing iOS, iPadOS, macOS, WatchOS, and tvOS applications on the Xcode IDE.” Build farms, render farms, and CI/CD farm are also target workloads.
But as the instances are bare-metal Macs, there seems to be nothing stopping users just running a Mac in the AWS cloud.
Sadly, Amazon’s pricing pages had not caught up with its announcement at the time of writing so we can’t assess whether using a macOS instance regularly will be viable.
The cloud colossus has revealed that tenancy will be for a minimum of 24 hours.
AWS says the new service was created in response to user requests. And it’s not done yet: it says instances running Apple’s new M1 silicon will land in 2021. ®
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[1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-use-mac-instances-to-build-test-macos-ios-ipados-tvos-and-watchos-apps/
[2] https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/15/death_to_hackintoshes/
[4] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
"Strange how terms get redefined"
In the context of cloud computing, bare metal means you get an actual physical host to yourself, not a virtualized one shared on a host with other customers. You run the OS and stack on the bare-metal of the server, not on a hypervisor (or god forbid, an emulator).
In other words, you are booting software of your choice on the bare-metal of the machine, a Mac Mini. The software in this case happens to be limited to recent macOS.
C.
Open VNC over internet Burn In Hell
Stop using VNC on the internet. It is the fastest way to getting hacked. .. Why???? Recommend Vnc-over-SSH or some similar too many idiots use Vnc on the internet without realising it is plain text unencrypted traffic !!!!
Only Elastic Block Storage can be used with the instances
If only EBS can be used with the instances I wonder how they attached this to the mac mini. As far as I know MacOS can't boot from iSCSI. Does AWS have a hardware solution for this?
Will help testing on Safari!
As a web shop, testing on Safari is a PITA for Windows devs. We need to use cloud services to virtualise devices it but this might be a neat alternative.
However
If nobody can see your pretty iMac, how will they know you're a Mac user?
Re: However
The number of times I've actually considered installing Gentoo, or Open BSD, on my MacBook... it would generate lovely confused looks from hipsters though.
It's not cheap
"Sadly, Amazon’s pricing pages had not caught up with its announcement"
It's there under https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/dedicated-hosts/pricing/ - mac1 $1.207 per hour, so it's not cheap, especially when the linked article states "with a minimum tenancy of 24 hours"
Only one piece of software worth running
Xcode - compiling software for another operating system (iOS)
Bare metal?
" run on a Mac Mini under macOS 10.14 (Mojave) "
Strange how terms get redefined. Not so long ago "bare metal" meant running OS-free on the hardware. I believe it still means this to some folks creating and using virtualisation. Here, it just seems to mean "using a Mac to run your own code".