Xcode Cloud subscriptions now available for developers

Comments

• Reply 1 of 12

  blastdoor Posts: 3,277member

  August 30, 2022 11:34PM

  How does the work completed in a “compute hour” compare to, say, an hour of M1?
• Reply 2 of 12

  daven Posts: 696member

  August 30, 2022 11:59PM

  blastdoor said:

  How does the work completed in a “compute hour” compare to, say, an hour of M1?

  From the Apple Developer website,
  
  
  

  A compute hour is an hour of time used to execute a specific task in the cloud, such as building an app or running automated tests. For example, running 5 tests of 12 minutes each equals one compute hour. Xcode Cloud runs tests in parallel with other actions, such as analyzing, archiving, and building, so you’ll get results quickly.
  
  ====

  
  so it is hard to say. It will depend on what you are doing and only using it will show how it performs. 

  edited August 2022
• Reply 3 of 12

  danox Posts: 2,844member

  August 31, 2022 2:01AM

  Subscriptions what could go wrong, Apple is begging for antitrust enforcement…..
  
  Personal finance classes are needed as part of the core curriculum in all schools as a requirement from the 7th grade all the way thru to the second year of junior college or four college.
  
  The best class I ever took at junior college was a personal finance class first semester right after high school.

  edited August 2022
• Reply 4 of 12

  tht Posts: 5,437member

  August 31, 2022 3:06AM

  blastdoor said:

  How does the work completed in a “compute hour” compare to, say, an hour of M1?

  It would depend on the CPUs Xcode cloud is using, which could just be servers services from Amazon, Google or Microsoft. Could be Xeons, could racks of Mac mini's, could be Epyc. Maybe they are buying from MacStadium or set it up with their own hardware. Hopefully someone will spill the beans.
  
  25 hrs goes buy really really fast. It's basically a number to try out the service.

  
• Reply 5 of 12

  Paul_B Posts: 82member

  August 31, 2022 10:11AM

  Twenty Five (25) hours of compute time!  Wow, lets code Dungeons and Dragons in black and white - that's not even coding one hour per day in a month - "Hey guys lets put our code on the cloud so it can be compromised - Great idea!" - Did I mention Open Source has been sharing code for 45 plus years.
  
• Reply 6 of 12

  dewme Posts: 5,356member

  August 31, 2022 12:08PM

  danox said:

  Subscriptions what could go wrong, Apple is begging for antitrust enforcement…..
  
  Personal finance classes are needed as part of the core curriculum in all schools as a requirement from the 7th grade all the way thru to the second year of junior college or four college.
  
  The best class I ever took at junior college was a personal finance class first semester right after high school.

  I don’t see anything here that Amazon, Google, or Microsoft aren’t already doing around their SAAS and PAAS offerings, as Tht noted. I’m sure there are some incremental cost and administration savings versus using a straight pay-as-you-go system.
  
  I do completely agree that personal finance, budgeting, financial accountability, or whatever we want to call it, should be instilled as a core curriculum from middle school on up. It’s interesting that the mayor of the small village I live in made the same statement you made in this month in his monthly newsletter. It’s a basic survival tool.
  
  At higher levels and for more advanced students, courses that introduce the fundamentals of time-value-of-money should also be considered  mandatory. One of the most useful classes I ever took at the undergrad level was Engineering Economics, which is time-value-of-money applied to engineering and business decisions, e.g., build vs buy, amortization, payback, etc. Ironically it was an elective for most engineering students, which I find quite astounding. I suppose a lot of people pick it up on the job or through necessity, like getting a car loan or home mortgage, but why stumble blindly in the dark when you don’t have to?
  
  In fact, individuals and organizations who have a firm grasp on engineering economics principles will probably have a much easier time figuring out whether Apple’s XCode Cloud subscriptions make sense for their business. 

  
• Reply 7 of 12

  Fidonet127 Posts: 507member

  August 31, 2022 12:10PM

  Paul_B said:

  Twenty Five (25) hours of compute time!  Wow, lets code Dungeons and Dragons in black and white - that's not even coding one hour per day in a month - "Hey guys lets put our code on the cloud so it can be compromised - Great idea!" - Did I mention Open Source has been sharing code for 45 plus years.
  

  That isn’t the point of this. Xcode to do the programming is still free. This is for compiling, testing, etc. People put their photos and other documents on the cloud, why is this different?

  
• Reply 8 of 12

  crowley Posts: 10,453member

  August 31, 2022 1:17PM

  The article didn't mention it, but the costs are:
  

  25 compute hours/month 
  Free (through December 2023, then US$14.99 per month if you choose to subscribe at that time.)
  
  100 compute hours/month
  US$49.99/month 
  
  250 compute hours/month
  US$99.99/month 
  
  1000 compute hours/month 
  US$399.99/month

  From: https://developer.apple.com/xcode-cloud/
  
  I'm not sure why this is particularly useful unless it is substantially faster than on a local machine, and Apple don't seem to be making any claims about that.

  edited August 2022
• Reply 9 of 12

  blastdoor Posts: 3,277member

  August 31, 2022 1:19PM

  tht said:

  blastdoor said:

  How does the work completed in a “compute hour” compare to, say, an hour of M1?

  It would depend on the CPUs Xcode cloud is using, which could just be servers services from Amazon, Google or Microsoft. Could be Xeons, could racks of Mac mini's, could be Epyc. Maybe they are buying from MacStadium or set it up with their own hardware. Hopefully someone will spill the beans.
  
  25 hrs goes buy really really fast. It's basically a number to try out the service.

  Yup -- it could be almost anything, which is why I asked. 
  
  Sounds like nobody here knows, either. 

  
• Reply 10 of 12

  zimmie Posts: 651member

  August 31, 2022 2:55PM

  crowley said:

  The article didn't mention it, but the costs are:
  

  25 compute hours/month 
  Free (through December 2023, then US$14.99 per month if you choose to subscribe at that time.)
  
  100 compute hours/month
  US$49.99/month 
  
  250 compute hours/month
  US$99.99/month 
  
  1000 compute hours/month 
  US$399.99/month

  From: https://developer.apple.com/xcode-cloud/
  
  I'm not sure why this is particularly useful unless it is substantially faster than on a local machine, and Apple don't seem to be making any claims about that.

  It's not so much that it's faster, though it is. It's more that it lets you run your tests somewhere else without tying up your local machine for 20+ minutes. It's faster because it can run many tests in parallel. An M1 MacBook Air, for example, doesn't really have the RAM to run tests in an iPhone simulator and iPad simulator and Watch simulator all at the same time, so you have to run them serially.
  

  blastdoor said:

  tht said:

  blastdoor said:

  How does the work completed in a “compute hour” compare to, say, an hour of M1?

  It would depend on the CPUs Xcode cloud is using, which could just be servers services from Amazon, Google or Microsoft. Could be Xeons, could racks of Mac mini's, could be Epyc. Maybe they are buying from MacStadium or set it up with their own hardware. Hopefully someone will spill the beans.
  
  25 hrs goes buy really really fast. It's basically a number to try out the service.

  Yup -- it could be almost anything, which is why I asked. 
  
  Sounds like nobody here knows, either. 

  Right now, Xcode Cloud VMs are amd64. The hardware identifier of the VMs is MacVM1,1. Each VM has four cores, 16 GB of RAM, and a framebuffer connected to a virtual 1080p display. It isn't yet known which specific processors are used, but it's likely to be Xeon Ws in rackmount Mac Pros.

  
• Reply 11 of 12

  auxio Posts: 2,727member

  August 31, 2022 3:18PM

  crowley said:

  The article didn't mention it, but the costs are:
  

  25 compute hours/month 
  Free (through December 2023, then US$14.99 per month if you choose to subscribe at that time.)
  
  100 compute hours/month
  US$49.99/month 
  
  250 compute hours/month
  US$99.99/month 
  
  1000 compute hours/month 
  US$399.99/month

  From: https://developer.apple.com/xcode-cloud/
  
  I'm not sure why this is particularly useful unless it is substantially faster than on a local machine, and Apple don't seem to be making any claims about that.

  It's really about the automation and maintenance side of things.  As a developer, I'm iterating and testing my app against the particular hardware configuration that I've set in Xcode.  However, to ship my app, I may need to build and test on 20 hardware configurations.  Sure I could set up a local Xcode server to run those 20 builds on each code change, but then I need to configure and maintain that server every time there's an Xcode or macOS update, deal with hardware upgrades, failures, etc.  Basically you're paying Apple to maintain a build server for you.

  
• Reply 12 of 12

  blastdoor Posts: 3,277member

  September 1, 2022 9:31AM

  zimmie said:

  Right now, Xcode Cloud VMs are amd64. The hardware identifier of the VMs is MacVM1,1. Each VM has four cores, 16 GB of RAM, and a framebuffer connected to a virtual 1080p display. It isn't yet known which specific processors are used, but it's likely to be Xeon Ws in rackmount Mac Pros.

  Thanks! That’s very interesting.

  
  

  Apple using Mac Pro for their own cloud services could improve the economics of the Mac Pro very nicely.