Scaleway announces Apple Silicon M1 as-a-Service

[senttoschool]

Would not it be cheaper to own your Mac Mini?

If you rent a Mac Mini for at least 24 hours whenever you make a commit of your code, you most likely need one Mac Mini every day.

It depends.

Let's say your team has 200 developers. Let's say each developer needs to build once/day, then you'll need to build and test 200x/day.

This might mean you need 20 Mac Minis sitting there ready to work. You'll need to store these Minis, maintain them, replace them if they break, create secure connections to them, etc. All this costs people and money.

Conversely, if you can just rent them whenever you need them via the cloud, it could cost much less and can scale much better. For example, what if once in a while, you need to build 400x/day? Do you run to the Apple store and make a purchase for 20 more Mac Minis? No, it's a hassle. But on AWS, you can just rent 40 Mac Minis for that day.

 

[Xiao_Xi]

A cloud-based CI is cheaper and more convenient than on-premise CI when you can choose pay-as-you-go. But, as you can't do this for macOS instances, I am not sure whether a cloud-based CI using Mac Minis is cheaper than using your own Mac Minis.

For reference, the most economical Mac Mini instance in AWS is almost US$ 12.

 

[ADGrant]

That didn't take long at all

I am surprised it too so long to be honest. Intel Mac minis have been available for rent in the cloud for years now.

 

[ADGrant]

A cloud-based CI is cheaper and more convenient than on-premise CI when you can choose pay-as-you-go. But, as you can't do this for macOS instances, I am not sure whether a cloud-based CI using Mac Minis is cheaper than using your own Mac Minis.

For reference, the most economical Mac Mini instance in AWS is almost US$ 12.

Or you could just use Xcode cloud or some third party alternative.

 

[Xiao_Xi]

you could just use Xcode cloud

Xcode Cloud will simplify CI for apps targeting the Apple ecosystem, but I doubt cross-platform headless libraries and tools could also benefit from Xcode Cloud.

some third party alternative

You're right. It seems Scaleway's Mac Mini instances are much cheaper and more suitable for CI than AWS's Mac Mini instances.

 

[Icelus]

I am surprised it too so long to be honest. Intel Mac minis have been available for rent in the cloud for years now.

This was back in February, 10 weeks after the Mac mini M1 was available.

 

[ADGrant]

Xcode Cloud will simplify CI for apps targeting the Apple ecosystem, but I doubt cross-platform headless libraries and tools could also benefit from Xcode Cloud.

True, cross platform builds would need two pipelines. However, Xcode Cloud is not the only cloud based CI system that provides MacOS support. Third party alternatives include Azure Devops which has supported MacOS and iOS builds for a while now.

 

[ADGrant]

This was back in February, 10 weeks after the Mac mini M1 was available.

I didn't see that part. That is a reasonable time frame.

 

[Icelus]

M1: How a design flaw slowed down Apple’s VNC

In February 2021, Scaleway introduced a new product: the Mac mini M1 from Apple.

blog.scaleway.com

 

[Fomalhaut]

AWS has M1 Mac Mini too.

Why do cloud service providers start to offer M1 Mac Mini now?

Do you mean "now, as opposed to earlier", or "why at all?".

There will be home-grown management software that needs to be applied hosted Macs, because the OS does not come out-of-the-box with everything needed to fit into 3rd party network / resource management, and billing frameworks.