Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is a three-week-long virtual event, launched its 2020 reInvent conference. It announced that customers can now provision macOS instances to its cloud for the very first time.
Monday evening’s announcement of the new Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud Mac instances (EC2) was made. They are based on AWS Nitro hypervisor and Apple’s Mac mini-hardware running Intel’s eighth generation Core i7 processor at 3.2GHz.
As with all AWS instances, Mac instances can be used together with other AWS services such as Amazon Elastic Block Storage, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), and others. The instances are compatible with macOS 10.14 and 10.15. Only one size is currently available: mac1.metal. This has a maximum of 12 vCPUs and 32GiB memory. It also supports 10Gbps throughput and 8Gbps EBS storage.
AWS is targeting Apple developers who want to use the cloud to test their Macs, iPads and iPhone apps. AWS notes that those who are already using Amazon EC2 for Android and Windows development will find the Mac instances a great opportunity to “consolidate the development of cross-platform apps.”
Jeff Barr, AWS evangelist, provided a detailed demonstration of the Mac instances in a blog posting Monday and also shared some details. For example, the instances are launched as EC2 Dedicated hosts with a minimum tenancy period of 24 hours. This is transparent to you, however it does mean that the instances can’t be used as part an Auto Scaling Group.
Barr stated that AWS plans keep its Amazon Machine Images updated as Apple releases OS updates. He also added, “We also plan on producing AMIs with updated Amazon Packages every quarter.”
Barr reports that AWS is also developing Mac instances to support the new ARM-based Apple M1 chips. Release is expected in 2021.
The Mac instances are currently available in the “US East (N. Virginia).
, US East Ohio
, US West (Oregon)
, Europe (Ireland).
, and Asia Pacific (Singapore).
” Regions, with more availability in the future. You can find more information, including pricing, here.
