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A comment on Amazon EC2 Mac Instances.

Re:Amazon EC2 Mac Instances by Shakahs on Monday November 30, 2020 @11:52PM (#25262449)
MacOS AMI images, EBS disks, VPC networking, 10gbps ENA. Bare metal only, Intel available now, M1 coming soon. This is another game changer.

The post says they’re based on Mac Minis, but also use AWS Nitro. Is this custom AWS specific hardware?

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Re:Amazon EC2 Mac Instances by NathanWilliams on Monday November 30, 2020 @11:56PM (#25262472)
Over Thunderbolt: https://twitter.com/_msw_/status/1333629867171057664?s=21
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Re:Amazon EC2 Mac Instances by boulos on Tuesday December 01, 2020 @12:35AM (#25262660)
Right. The Nitro cards speak PCIe, and Thunderbolt is “just” PCIe plus DP in one:

> Thunderbolt combines PCI Express (PCIe) and DisplayPort (DP) into two serial signals,[7][8] and additionally provides DC power, all in one cable.

From the Wikipedia entry at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderbolt_(interface)

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Re:Amazon EC2 Mac Instances by sneak on Monday November 30, 2020 @11:55PM (#25262466)
Yes, AIUI AWS Nitro is a PCI (in this case thunderbolt?) disk abstraction system that fronts EBS for the host.
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Re:Amazon EC2 Mac Instances by Shakahs on Tuesday December 01, 2020 @12:31AM (#25262635)
That sounds elegant for IO, but I wonder how device level security is handled, out of band management, and firmware updates.
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Re:Amazon EC2 Mac Instances by shiftpgdn on Tuesday December 01, 2020 @01:22AM (#25262907)
BSDP + IPKVM?
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