MacStadium brings macOS instances orchestrated by Kubernetes to AWS

Apple developers can now access macOS instances orchestrated by Kubernetes on AWS with MacStadium's Orka platform. MacStadium is a company providing hosting and cloud services using Apple hardware, and Orka (Orchestration with Kubernetes on Apple) is its Kubernetes-based container platform for handling workloads running in …

[captain veg]

That's nice, dear.

What's it for?

-A.

[localzuk]

Hilariously expensive

A mac1 instance, in London, on-demand, is $1.253 per hour. $10,976.28 per year. You can't buy one reserved it seems.

The mac1 is the i7 - 6 core, 32GB RAM. Storage is separate as well.

That's a preposterously large amount of money.

[Tim99]

Re: Hilariously expensive

Is there a minimum charge? Otherwise, a few hours of testing would be cheap…

[localzuk]

Re: Hilariously expensive

It would need to be a very small number of hours. As you can buy the top level Mac Mini for about the equivalent of a month and half's use.

[Fazal Majid]

Re: Hilariously expensive

The Intel Mac Mini is no longer available for sale, although refurbs will probably continue to be available for some time.

[Mayday]

Re: Hilariously expensive

"That's a preposterously large amount of money."

Indeed. You could almost afford an obsolete 4 year old Mac Pro for that amount of money.

[karlkarl]

Since macOS Ventura, there is an element of DRM during the installation process to connect to Apple's servers before you can continue.

I am interested in how they automate this (or if dealing with imaging instead, license compliance).

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe because you're connecting to download the ISO/data before installation? I've installed with VMWare via ISO and haven't any Apple accounts.

[TVU]

I think that this was a telling comment:

"since VMware disclosed last year that vSphere ESXi 7.0.x would be its final release to support Mac platforms, leaving some customers to cast around for an alternative virtualization platform for macOS and Xcode development"

Under Tim Cook's tenure, there appears to have been a significant change in emphasis with those who use macOS for serious development and enterprise work being neglected, e.g. macOS Server was axed last year, while Macs are effectively becoming lifestyle toys. Indeed, if a business is using a large number of Macs that need managing, the easiest thing to do now is to just go straight to Jamf Pro.

[Roland6]

> Indeed, if a business is using a large number of Macs that need managing, the easiest thing to do now is to just go straight to Jamf Pro.

Where “large” isn’t a particularly large number in practice.

[fg_swe]

No

My M1 Macbook is a very fast platform for software development. It is also super efficient in terms of power consumption, as it runs for two working days on one battery charge. A nice and useful office package included. A real Unix machine as soon as the command line is launched. And yes, all looks great, too.

Not sure how nicely a fleet of M1/M2 mac minis would serve as datacenter/cloud machines. Maxing out at 32GB RAM is certainly not enough for some application types. But if you want power-efficient servers, the M2 definitely is interesting.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: No

"My M1 Macbook is a.."

This isn't about real Apple hardware, it's about emulating the hardware requirements with a VM.

As far as the "fleet of M1/M2 mac minis", well, I don't own any Apple hardware but I develop a couple small C++/QT programs that I test with VMWare and I must say VMWare'd MacOS (Monterey and Ventura) is _VERY_ slow with some programs. There's a shareware digital audio editor that this can be observed in called "Reaper" (it's crazy slow in a VMWare MacOS VM). It's a serious enough problem that programs like Reaper can't be expected to be usable right now and since VMWare is stopping development, some programs may never be usable. That said, I don't have a scale to compare VMWare's implementation of VM'd MacOS so it's possible that it is/was crap anyhow.

[bety90]

This was a great read, thank you.