Scaleway turns Mac Minis into high‑density, Raspberry Pi–managed servers

https://www.scaleway.com/en/blog/how-we-turn-apples-mac-mini-into-high-performance-dedicated-servers/

by Lwrless • 8 months ago

89 99 8 months ago

scaleway.com

youngtaff• 8 months ago

I’d like to know what’s on the baseboard that the Pi is attached to

elcritch• 8 months ago

Looks like some sort of power supply converter? Maybe a USB-C power splitter.

Havoc• 8 months ago

Looks like a relay so probably to powercycle it.

Don't think everything needed is included in the picture. Definitely additional cables for power and networking would need to be added

hinkley3• 8 months ago

And yet they have the pi backward so the networking ports are buried. I have no idea what’s going on here.

Topgamer7• 8 months ago

Todays game of was it AI generated?

The compact size of the Mac mini, which packs a powerful System on a Chip (SoC) into a tiny footprint.The energy efficiency of Apple silicon (M-series) chips, which allows high density without overheating or excessive power draw.

This really adds nothing to the article, and looks like AI fluff to me.

Combine that with there being a bold section in like every single paragraph, I'm going to assume yes

jaffa2• 8 months ago

If it smells like ai…

fragmede2• 8 months ago

It doesn't? If you didn't know those two things, they seem highly relevant to the subject being discussed. They define SoC, which might be an acronym you've known since high school (I did, but I'm a total nerd), and it justifies why use Mac minis instead of what usually gets used.

As to whether it was AI generated or not, who cares? It's useful information if you didn't know it already, and if those words came out of matrix math or someone non-technical with a BS in communications, does it really matter to you? Are you going hungry tonight because the money that went to creating those words went to Nvidia and not Sarah in Marketing? Sarah in Marketing might be out of a job soon, but her boyfriend has a good job that's not threatened by AI, so I hope she'll be fine, but I don't know. Is that the underlying worry here?

There is an emdash in the article though, you didn't think to call that out too?

fiddlerwoaroof• 8 months ago

The thing that got me was always referring to Scaleway in the third person. e.g. this read like the response I get when I ask AI to review code:

Scaleway’s solution to that problem was ingenious: embedding a Raspberry Pi module with each Mac mini.

(I realize this may be an artifact of a corporate style guide, but I'd much prefer "Our solution to that problem was embedding . . ." Both because the "was ingenious" doesn't add a ton and reads like puffery and because this is Scaleway's own blog and referring to yourself in the third person is grating.)

bityard2• 8 months ago

To me, it just reads like their marketing person's first language is not English. Which tracks because I believe the whole company is based on France.

bityard2• 8 months ago

OTOH, empty human-generated marketing slop has been around for a LOT longer than empty AI marketing slop and also reads exactly like this.

pzo• 8 months ago

not sure why the attach rpi for every mac mini, wouldn't it be cheaper to have one rpi and 9 mac minis connectd to 10 port switch? I also wished one day to make cluster out of Apple TVs - they are very cheap (~150usd for version with ethernet) and most likely the new upcoming version will have more powerful A-series apple sillicon. I guess tvOS is just very restricted.

stereo• 8 months ago

You mean a kvm switch?

azinman2• 8 months ago

What would you do with a cluster of Apple TVs?

jitl2• 8 months ago

run computer programs probably

mschuster91• 8 months ago

not sure why the attach rpi for every mac mini, wouldn't it be cheaper to have one rpi and 9 mac minis connectd to 10 port switch?

Simple... they're (likely) running something on the Raspberry Pi's that sets them up as USB gadgets, aka the Mac Mini "sees" a virtual keyboard and mouse. That's enough to manage remote provisioning.

To replicate that they'd need a KVM switch which doesn't have some weird edge case in how exactly it does USB-C switching, and it needs to be remotely controlled. A Pi is cheaper plus the failure modes of a Pi are more understood than the failure mode of some weird ass KVM switch someone cobbled together in China.

itrash12• 8 months ago

That's exactly the purpose of the raspberry they setup in this image

kayodelycaon• 8 months ago

They’re connected to a single USB-C cable. For many technical reasons you can’t have a simple kvm which switches inputs. You’ll need to continuously power all 9 minis some way. All nine USB-C cables will need a continuous, active connection.

To do this, you will need a smart controller that switches which port it’s talking to.

Or you can stick a relatively cheap device on every mini and and connect it to the network.

Having a “controller” for every mini means you can swap single units in both hardware and software very easily. There’s a one-to-one relationship and you don’t have to deal with pairing.

mikepurvis5• 8 months ago

Just spitballing here, but if your interface to these things is USB-C, you should be able to boot them off an image that has a standard SSH key and then you can get in and ID them from a serial number or MAC address. I don't see the identification part as being a huge part of what's gained with the 1:1 configuration.

Is video forwarding part of the product offering, or simply considered required for management functions?

Either way, I probably agree that a raspi per unit probably makes sense at a scale of a few dozen racks, but it would be interesting to do the math on when it would be price-efficient to have a 1:n management node scheme. I don't imagine there are many USB-C hubs that support being display sinks on the downstream ports (if that's even possible at all) but perhaps you could use an FPGA to synthesize a small ARM core with a bunch of native USB-C interfaces capable of doing it?

tracker12• 8 months ago

Simpler design... let alone constraints of the USB and/or other interfaces in use. Not to mention 1:1 of management port access to system access, where other solutions may be problematic.

nodesocket• 8 months ago

How does the Pi communicate with the Mini? Software stack? Zero details and useful information in this post.

khannn• 8 months ago

AI slop

mtlynch• 8 months ago

Yeah, I was hoping for more detail as well. I'm guessing they did something similar to what I did to make my Pi control computers.[0]

The Raspberry Pi 4 can emulate a USB keyboard and mouse, and there are inexpensive adapters that allow it to capture display output. You can also hook it up to a relay to cycle power for an external device.

[0] https://mtlynch.io/tinypilot/

tracker12• 8 months ago

Yeah, my guess was something like pikvm as well.

ey3ball7• 8 months ago

As others have pointed out, keyboard / mouse emulation is pretty useful, but it's also quite quirky. We use MDM to automate configuration delivery as much as possible, I think it's been mentioned as well (although we're not zero touch yet).

You might want to look at Asahi Linux's Central Scrutinizer for some insights on the fancier stuff that can be done over the USB-C port.

hinkley3• 8 months ago

https://www-uploads.scaleway.com/Mac_mini_rack_1_e31ad1da6e....

This is not the image I expected to encounter under the title, “high density”.

Make those sleds taller and do three, maybe four per sled with a pair of large diameter fans. That’ll would be high density. This is medium at best.

PunchyHamster• 8 months ago

Seriosuly, like surely they could've at least used 1 rpi per rack ?

Or find cable with matching length?

jcheng• 8 months ago

Interesting that they run them upside down.

teaearlgraycold• 8 months ago

It’s because the power button is on the bottom.

throwaway31131• 8 months ago

The fan would move the heat off that given sled but if the channel between the sleds can’t remove that extra heat you probably didn’t help yourself.

My point is the picture doesn’t show any details on the room or what’s outside the rack so it’s hard to know what’s optimal.

hinkley3• 8 months ago

Fans generally are used to move cold air from in front of a rack behind the rack. There appear to be no fans at all here except those in the mini,which would cause the problem you discuss. I’m talking about supplemental cooling with a high volume low noise fan in a 2 or 3u enclosure.

trebligdivad3• 8 months ago

It might be that they're limited by something else in their existing racks; say power or networking ports, so this is an easy hack to get into their existing rack scheme.

aneutron• 8 months ago

My guess is its the size of the blades.

e.g. https://servermall.com/fr/sets/serveurs-blade-dell/?srsltid=...

ey3ball7• 8 months ago

I agree the picture doesn't do it justice, it doesn't show the full cabling, we might share a new one.

Also keep in mind that these SLEDs are compatible both with the M2 & the M4. M2 require more surface area & cover the whole free space on the SLED

mikepurvis5• 8 months ago

Unlike the old rack mount options for the trashcan Mac Pro units (eg https://photos.imgix.com/racking-mac-pros), it doesn't seem like much thought has been given here to a front-to-back airflow.

I'm also surprised they're touting the density of this solution— seems like the obvious thing would be to put the Minis on their sides. A 4U chassis has 17.5cm vertical space in it, and a Mac Mini is 17cm wide. With the Mini being 2in in height, that suggests 8-9 Minis in a 4U rack, vs 2 Minis in a 2U rack for Scaleway's trays.

EDIT: Here's a commercially-available solution that's 6/4U: https://www.mk1manufacturing.com/Rack-Mount-for-6-M4-mac-min..., you'd think it could basically be this but with the management plane behind or in front. And as others have said, making the management plane be more shared, so it's not 1:1.

tecleandor3• 8 months ago

Yep! I would have thought about doing a 3d printed "tray" that goes under the mini and routes front/cold and back/hot air to the exterior of the rack...

notpeter• 8 months ago

This is what MacStadium does. Here's a drawer design for the previous gen intel macs:

https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/687e650a56916806eaaf8f62/...

You can find a bunch more detail in their related patent filings:

https://patents.google.com/patent/US20240397658A1/en?q=(%22m...

mikepurvis5• 8 months ago

I was thinking the units all face the front in a shallow drawer, whereas MS is doing a deep drawer, which is almost certainly even better for density.

averageRoyalty2• 8 months ago

For anyone reading along at home, 2 inches is just over 5cm.

mikepurvis5• 8 months ago

Yeah sorry for mixing units like that. I think of it as a 19" rack and know that refers to the width, but I had to look up the height of a 4U chassis and Google told it to me in cm, so then I went with that for that dimension.

jabberwhookie• 8 months ago

Each rack can hold up to 96 Mac minis,

Sounds like 2 per 1U to me. I think it's power efficiency that limits filling a rack with typical 1U servers in most plans. The power efficiency here is probably not really impressive enough given so many power units, etc.

mikepurvis5• 8 months ago

Yeah I'm a bit confused on that. In the picture, each row is definitely taller than the power strip, plus 1U is 44.45mm in height, whereas the current-gen Mac Mini is 50mm high.

I'm pretty sure the drawers are 2U, but given that I don't know how they would get 96 nodes in a standard 42U rack.

pm3• 8 months ago

I was interested in provisioning one of these a few months back through Scaleway, but couldn't navigate their sign-up process without it dumping me back to the start everytime. Nor did I receive a reply when I e-mailed their support e-mail.

I don't know if that's changed (they had odd pricing too, like Startup vs. Business, of which the difference wasn't clear), but aware. I hope someone has more success than I did.

sparrish• 8 months ago

Scaleway's site and support is horrible, as you've found. But their pricing and offerings are solid and their network is... OK. For the price, they're better than Hetzner... if you can get signed up!

BozeWolf• 8 months ago

Totally different experience here! For a project I wanted to try “euro cloud”. Something comparable to digital ocean. No need for hyperscaler functionality.

It has been great. Good terraform provider and reliable service. I like their console, although the design feel very vaporwave to me.

Of course stuff can be better, but it is rapidly improving. The way they implemented grafana + user management was shit. But that’s fixed. Grafana still feels bolted on however. And login is a bit weird with their dedibox or whatever button next to the cloud offering. But no where near as confusing as aws is!

Also bumped on a bug in their terraform provider, found a related bug report, contributed some info and it was fixed within two weeks.

Quite happy so far. Running serverless sql, serverless containers. Secrets management and some iam config. No big stuff but quite sure it is capable to run a decently sized saas.

pm3• 8 months ago

It was specifically for the M1 mac minis, so not too fussed about everything else, but judging from the comments, experiences are mixed.

I'll try to sign up again in a week or two.

awaymazdacx5• 8 months ago

Grim environment in the rodeo. The /home/directory, which the Rasberry-Pi doesn't align or distill as a symbolic markup language in .async or transport layer protocol and refers to /dev/ spinlock rolling release kernel version recursion or discursiveness.

summarity• 8 months ago

We also have a video of how we built the (then-M1) infra at GitHub: https://youtu.be/I2J2MzKjcqY?si=piMVam3qUpJGeW9Q

With 60 minis per rack, and custom sled cases.

tecleandor3• 8 months ago

Oh nice! That quite more complex, but I like it!

rvz• 8 months ago

Scaleway has some of the best prices for cloud Mac Minis and has better deals than the scam that is AWS's overpriced cloud Mac Minis.

Going with AWS for cloud Mac Minis is the quickest way to lose a lot of money if you don't know what to do with it and to flush as much cash down the drain as quickly as possible.

cactusplant7374• 8 months ago

What do people use mac servers for?

fragmede2• 8 months ago

running macOS, which runs Xcode, which is required for making and signing iOS and macOS apps, Witcher, then sold on the App Store for money dust justifying spending money on their, or a similar service.

trebligdivad3• 8 months ago

MacOS dev and CI.

throw_m239339• 8 months ago

Running CI for Iphone / Ipad dev?

20 years ago the company I worked for used a Mac-Mini for video transcoding, because there was some DRM issue we had to deal with, I don't remember the specifics.

IshKebab• 8 months ago

To compile and test software for Mac.

mystifyingpoi• 8 months ago

It's not strictly speaking a server even. Just a rented personal computer.

itrash12• 8 months ago

Generally the main purpose was CI, blockchain mining and AI training

trebligdivad3• 8 months ago

You'd think that from an environmental point of view, Apple would be able to sell packs of Mac Mini boards without the case and packaging for people doing this; with no physical board or electronic change, it would be easy.

Linkd• 8 months ago

I get it, but I’ve never really bought into the idea that Apple optimizes for the environment out of pure altruism.

knowitnone3• 8 months ago

but they make more money selling the whole thing

itrash12• 8 months ago

Yes, and the actual license is pretty limiting as we have to sell the mac for at least 24h, not less, and no virtualization.

jandrese• 8 months ago

It's kind of amazing to offer this service at all when the vendor is so blatantly hostile to the idea.

kccqzy• 8 months ago

It’s madness that Apple can dictate that you have to sell it for at least 24h, not less. Ideally the manufacturer shouldn’t dictate how the property is being rented.

jsheard2• 8 months ago

The annoying thing is that Apple still makes proper servers, they just don't sell them anymore.

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/in-the-loop/2025/10/shipping-...

I guess the Mac Pro Rack Edition technically exists, but that's needlessly huge (5U!) for a single node, ungodly expensive, and doesn't have server amenities like a BMC, so it's not exactly flying off the shelves.

jagged-chisel• 8 months ago

This sounds rather entitled. They’re building their own servers for their infrastructure needs. No different than any of the other behemoths with their own data centers.

hmokiguess• 8 months ago

Reminded me how Victor Taelin built his distributed computing cluster using those. https://xcancel.com/VictorTaelin/status/1901661374444392951#...

bigyabai• 8 months ago

Hope the resale value is still good on those machines, he hasn't mentioned the cluster on his Twitter in months...

ravetcofx• 8 months ago

Are they powering them with USB-C? I didn't think that was possible/supported.

tecleandor3• 8 months ago

That's just for control, in the photos they still have no power connected, not even for the Raspberry Pi...

itrash12• 8 months ago

No, the USB-C is just there to act as a KVM for administrating purpose, as the MDM hasn't enough administration capability

itrash12• 8 months ago

I was part of the team that built this project at Scaleway, ask me anything

Reventlov• 8 months ago

My experience with a mac mini in a small R&D team has been a nightmare : the OS sucks so much for anything that is not a single user (at a time) on the machine, coming from the Systemd/Linux world

What was your experience ?

itrash12• 8 months ago

Yes, the experience is pretty bad, we were doing baremetal, so I assume there were only a single user on it. The tooling and its documentation was really bad too, actually we based ourselves on the asahi project and its documentation and some open-source project that did a lot of work on reverse engineering all of the system we used.

From a user based perspective, using the remote desktop feature was a pain and I don't think any of our users were actually using it, the main use was : CI, AI training and bitcoin mining.

ey3ball7• 8 months ago

I'm part of the current team ! Ask me anything itrash doesn't know ;)

itrash12• 8 months ago

Good to see you :), there a lot of good questions ! I'm not working on the project anymore so you'll be able to reply with better answer. But still had a really good experience with you guys.

kindermoumoute• 8 months ago

plop

schmuckonwheels3• 8 months ago

Continuing to act like these ugly hacks are a normal way of doing business, is a continual signal to Apple that they don't need to build a rack-mount PC or server ever again.

If their developer community grew a pair and made themselves heard, then maybe the billion dollar company would do their effing job and provide a proper rackable development platform.

Which they had many years ago, before they morphed into a company that builds telephones and furniture that occasionally functions as a computer.

Instead we pretend like extension cords and gluing Raspberry Pi's together is totally ok for professional purposes.

itrash12• 8 months ago

Trust me, at our scale ... Apple didn't care at all about us, even if Scaleway is one of the biggest cloud provider in France.

And actually the project was made to be faster on the market than AWS on their M1 offer, not to be industrialized at first.

schmuckonwheels3• 8 months ago

I get it, you did what you had to do, but you're not the only example.

They have the knowledge and it's existed in the past (Xserve) but they will never do it again because they design and sell furniture now.

Tell me they couldn't design a Mac Mini with holes for rack ears, built in BMC or serial console.... even if it was a specialty product people would pay a premium

jsheard2• 8 months ago

Continuing to act like these ugly hacks are a normal way of doing business, is a continual signal to Apple that they don't need to build a rack-mount PC or server ever again.

They technically still have the Rack Mac Pro, but that's such a half-assed offering that it's easy to forget it exists. It's a huge 5U chassis but if you look at the internals it's comical how little of the space is actually used for anything, because they kept the same layout as the Intel version which was designed to host multiple high-power GPUs, but dropped dGPU support in the Apple Silicon transition.

schmuckonwheels3• 8 months ago

Yes polished stainless steel furniture.

At 38 lbs and low starting price of $7,500 who can resist?

NaomiLehman• 8 months ago

Also gotta love servers with non-ECC memory

keeda• 8 months ago

Hah so, I have a couple of old Mac Minis in my homelab that I use very occassionally but would like to access over the Internet (say, via Tailscale etc.) Ideally they'd be sleeping most of the time to conserve power, and only be kicked awake when needed, e.g. by a Wake-on-Lan packet.

Unfortunately I would need another device active at all times to listen for commands and send that packet on demand. I was toying with the idea of using a Raspberry Pi connected to the router to perform that specific function, but I never got around to it.

Funny to see that idea scaled up to a server rack!

ballpug2• 8 months ago

Identifying MAC spoofing in client network interfaces, which allow DNS poisoning or encrypted layer credential from a client address. Whether there is pragmatic use to spoof, or a secondary drive with no identifier.

Scaleway turns Mac Minis into high‑density, Raspberry Pi–managed servers

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