Timeline for Is it a good idea to use mac mini as backend server for a medium size business?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
16 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jan 29, 2022 at 1:07 | comment | added | jksoegaard | @steve Regarding Vapor - it might be a good choice, and it might be a poor choice. It depends on what you want to achieve with it. Vapor is good for building web APIs when you want to use Swift as a programming language. However, not all APIs are web APIs, and not all APIs would be suited as web APIs. So a web API might not fit your scenario at all - and it might be a good fit. You will need to explain what you're trying to develop before anyone can evaluate that. | |
| Jan 29, 2022 at 0:45 | comment | added | jksoegaard | @steve I'm not saying that heat and aircondition is "an issue" in terms of having one or two Mac Minis that you want to have running in an office-like environment. I'm saying that if you want a reliable service running on them - then you'll run into issues, if you do not know what you're doing. How will you handle a power outage? - how will you handle a hot day where the aircondition fails? - are you sure the aircondition doesn't fail in such a way that water drips down on your Mac? - is it easy to steal the Mac? - what happens when the cleaning lady accidentially janks a cable, etc. | |
| Jan 29, 2022 at 0:40 | comment | added | jksoegaard | @steve Are you sure you have actually thought the use of RealityKit through? - This is not normally something where a boss "wanting a cloud solution" warrants running it on the server. Usually you would find that this is technically impossible. I would strongly advise thinking this through, asking here with more details or consulting a professional before taking that decision. You risk investing a lot of time and money into something that can't work. | |
| Jan 28, 2022 at 22:56 | comment | added | steve | @jksoegarrd Thank you very much for your help and inputs. I will try to figure out if we want to stick with in-house server or service like aws. | |
| Jan 28, 2022 at 22:42 | comment | added | steve | We are a really small company so a lot of times our decisions are not necessary based on best practices. (I guess this comment contradicts the medium size business thing I mentioned earlier, that was just me trying to plan ahead) | |
| Jan 28, 2022 at 22:39 | comment | added | steve | @jksoegaard I recommended running RealityKit on client's side but my boss wanted a cloud solution. I think server heat and air condition would be not too big of an issue, since we already have an older server in-house and mac mini doesn't really produce much heat. The only thing i am worried about is the server API, I am thinking of using of using Vapor for backend -- seems okay from my quick research, but I have never used it before so not too sure about how seamless is the integration. | |
| Jan 28, 2022 at 21:24 | comment | added | jksoegaard | @steve Similarly for programming your interface - consult a professional, or be prepared to spend many hours educating yourself before having a finished project. You will essentially need to create your own API that provides the link to RealityKit - however that is not necessarily simple if you want this to be secure, scalable, debugable, and so on. If this is a hobby project that does not work on personal or business data, you might be better off - but getting hacked is still a major annoyance in a hobby project. | |
| Jan 28, 2022 at 21:22 | comment | added | jksoegaard | @steve From your comments it seems you have no experience with server management and client/server programming. I strongly suggest you consult a professional before embarking on this - otherwise you could be setting yourself up for failure. If your requirements are that the app should work 24/7 with a relatively high level of uptime, it is not a good idea to be setting up an in-house server farm as an amateur. Get a professional to do that, or at least choose a cloud solution where the basics of hardware maintenance, power, cooling and physical security is taken care of. | |
| Jan 28, 2022 at 21:20 | comment | added | jksoegaard | @steve Running RealityKit in the background on a server seems quite unconventional. Have you considered all options for whether you could run that on the client instead? (i.e. in the app) Is it perhaps possible for you to tell us what the purpose of your app is? | |
| Jan 28, 2022 at 17:42 | comment | added | steve | Yes, it's tempting to use a cloud-based solution. I am not exactly sure how many visits we will get. Right now I am just trying to figure out the basics (ex. how to set up a basic server so when the user sends the server a command, it returns "hello world" from swift. | |
| Jan 28, 2022 at 17:30 | comment | added | steve | We would like to run RealityKit in the background. As a follow up question. Once you have the macOS server setup, how do you let the user run a particular API function without giving them remote access? (any good tutorials out there?) | |
| Jan 28, 2022 at 6:34 | comment | added | nohillside♦ | One additional thing to consider is scaling. If you can't control the number of users your app gets you may be facing a sudden increase (or decrease) in computing power needs on the backend. Unless you build your own solution to scale (get a new Mini in, configured and up&running within hours) a cloud-based solution may have benefits here. | |
| Jan 28, 2022 at 1:47 | comment | added | jksoegaard | Which API is that? Many of them have implementations on other operating systems. | |
| Jan 28, 2022 at 0:41 | comment | added | steve | Thank you. Yes, the main reason is because there is an API from Mac that we have to use. Otherwise, I would 100% use a linux server. | |
| Jan 28, 2022 at 0:39 | vote | accept | steve | ||
| Jan 28, 2022 at 0:35 | history | answered | jksoegaard | CC BY-SA 4.0 |