You want dusty Mac Mini laying under desk somewhere which if fails will put your entire operation on pause for couple of days?
There might be valid business uses for that, but for a company that invested a huge amount of money in a team of developers and then pays them through the nose for every hour whether they work or not and maybe have clients that count on updates, that is simply not acceptable.
Also many companies choose to have their entire infra in the cloud and then it doesn't make sense to spend effort to integrate one physical machine.
It is not failure rate, it is the cost if it happens.
I work for large corporations and the calculations are entirely different from what a small, cash strapped startup would be doing.
For example, if you work on a new product and it would take 1 day to get Mac Mini for free vs you would be paying for cloud solution 1000 dollars daily but get it one day sooner, it might still be well worthwhile to get cloud version.
Because if you think about it, it is possible that Mac Mini would be holding up your product development for one day, then you calculate how much you hope to earn from that product daily and how much you are loosing while you haven't launched and then it is no brainer.
As I said, it depends on business case. For some, the cost of this M1 VM is not going to be any factor in the decision.
Have you seen how expensive GPUs are in the cloud? Have you seen how many clients are that pay for huge farms of these?
At that price it takes about a year to pay for the hardware. Factoring in the cost of hosting the hardware it seems reasonable (macstadium charges 30-70 EUR a month for colocation alone).
It's still not cheap if you can ignore the hosting cost and need it for several years but it's way cheaper than using AWS for intel mac minis.
You can probably stop renting on the weekend and if you have an app with infrequent updates you don't need to pay every day. With the right workflow it is definitively cheaper than buying.
It’s network effect, not vendor lock-in. If you are doing B2B, chances are good your peers are also in AWS, regardless of the lock-in effects of other Amazon services (which are real, and like any lock-in are always negative).
I am old enough to have collocates at Exodus in 2000 for the exact same reason: everyone I needed to work with collocates with them. (The later went bankrupt and became Savvis, no idea what they are called today or if they still exist)
Even if 90% of your peers are in Amazon, the egress fees on the other 10% cost more than sending all of your data over a competitively priced network connection.
And that's the best case, where all your connections to them start and end in the same availability zone. Just inter-AZ fees cost more than you'd normally pay for transit.
Scaleway have an API that could realistically be driven through a CI process. Assuming the idea is to do automated testing, and to destroy instances when done, the cost is likely to be pretty low.
The page specifies the price is hourly and doesn't seem to list that restriction. Could you please link to where it is specified?
Edit: I don't think you're right. I've checked the Scaleway console and it appears the minimum unit of billing for this is one hour. I'd check, but they're out of stock.
Second edit: I missed the part where it says 24 hour minimum period on the instance setup page:
"As required by Apple License, you must keep this instance at least 24 hours. You will be able to delete it only after 24 hours."
Here[1] is the license for BigSur. The relevant section is 3.A.(ii). This clause was added for BigSur so I _think_ that if you're leasing a VPS with macOS Catalina or older you can legally rent it for less than 24 hours.
Edit: It seems that before BigSur the legallity of subleasing macOS was a "gray area". I guess as long as it doesn't hurt Apple they didn't come after you.
Makes me wonder how they draw the line between renting a Mac and providing a service which happens to run on a Mac. I guess I know the answer (arbitrarily).
I'm working for a customer whose IT only really deals with Microsoft. We as iOS developers had an internally set up build server but it's unused right now, because everybody works remote and it's behind the corporate mote. This Scaleway offering would work much better.
Getting in-house IT to host a machine in their(our?) on-site data center would cost my department a lot more than 72eur/month, and that is before I pay for the hardware.
