ec2-macos-init VS AutoSpotting

I don't think they're using false or duplicate Apple devices for this. I think that it may be likely they are using AWS resources for it: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/mac/

When AWS first came out with these, this was my first thought. People could spin up an EC2 instance and use it for iMessage, and Beeper came to be shortly after this feature went live in AWS.

AWS do have Mac instances you can use, although I'm not sure if you get the full macOS UI experience. https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/mac/

If all you really need is to write swift, you could use something like https://github.com/sickcodes/Docker-OSX or https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/mac/

AWS https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/mac/

I’m pretty sure that terms and conditions thing you’re worrying about is fake news. AWS offer Big Sur instances and they’re charged per second. https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/mac/

Have seen that AWS have a mac host option. Perfect for testing environments.

You can also spin up an EC2 instance on AWS, yes: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/mac/

get yourself a VM from AWS, MacStadium, macOS-VM etc.

There's a service that handles obtaining the cheapest spot instances to your specs by a former aws engineer https://github.com/LeanerCloud/AutoSpotting

Effectively, it starts up cheap spot instances (based on specified criteria) across a variety of instance types to replace whatever regular instance in an autoscaling group comes online and then spins down the regular instance.

EG: That m4a you wanted may be expensive... but nobody is using m4ad so it's 85% off and it meets the specified CPU/RAM requirements... auto spotting will spin it up instead.

Having used it on and off over the years it is sometimes eyebrow raising to see 4xl boxes running cheaper than the xl box they replaced :)

I've been heavily using ChatGPT on my autospotting.io software, where it 3-5x my productivity, releasing in 6 weeks more improvements than in the previous 6 months combined: https://github.com/LeanerCloud/AutoSpotting/discussions/489

Relevant: https://github.com/cloudutil/AutoSpotting

I've seen some third party services that automate migration to / replacement with spot instances, but haven't used them yet personally.

Going serverless, in many places, has been the most effective cost optimization for me.

I've also been maintaining a Golang library that essentially exposes the same data structure used under the hood by ec2instances.info as a Golang data structure, which is very convenient for embedding into other tools that can do lots of things with this raw data, like I do it in my AutoSpotting project.

I think autospotting can do this.

https://github.com/AutoSpotting/AutoSpotting is an interesting project that might help you with implementing this. It will automatically swap-out on-demand instances for spot and auto-restart as on-demand if spot capacity disappears.

we scale up to about 100 machines. We use spot instances EXTENSIVELY. And that configuration was tricky actually. Its been a couple of months now. Works pretty ok.

k3s is actually pretty simple to use now. the tricky part was to integrate with https://github.com/kubernetes/cloud-provider-aws and https://github.com/DirectXMan12/k8s-prometheus-adapter

The hardest part is to get it to work with spot instances. we use https://github.com/AutoSpotting/AutoSpotting to integrate with it.