Mac Minis -- December 19, 2020

Some housekeeping. This has been posted before but for various reasons I'm posting it again. From technocrunch:

AWS today opened its re:Invent conference with a surprise announcement: the company is bringing the Mac mini to its cloud. 

These new EC2 Mac instances, as AWS calls them, are now generally available. They won’t come cheap, though.

The target audience here — and the only one AWS is targeting for now — is developers who want cloud-based build and testing environments for their Mac and iOS apps. But it’s worth noting that with remote access, you get a fully-featured Mac mini in the cloud, and I’m sure developers will find all kinds of other use cases for this as well.

Given the recent launch of the M1 Mac minis, it’s worth pointing out that the hardware AWS is using — at least for the time being — are i7 machines with six physical and 12 logical cores and 32 GB of memory. Using the Mac’s built-in networking options, AWS connects them to its Nitro System for fast network and storage access. This means you’ll also be able to attach AWS block storage to these instances, for example.

Unsurprisingly, the AWS team is also working on bringing Apple’s new M1 Mac minis into its data centers. The current plan is to roll this out “early next year,” AWS tells me, and definitely within the first half of 2021. 

Both AWS and Apple believe that the need for Intel-powered machines won’t go away anytime soon, though, especially given that a lot of developers will want to continue to run their tests on Intel machines for the foreseeable future.

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Rock Climbing

My camera's battery was running low so I only got a couple "climbs." She did seven climbs today. This was her second climb today in the 45-minute session. The fifth or sixth climb was the most challenging but I did not get it on film.