Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

Amazon EC2 Mac instances enable customers to run on-demand macOS workloads in the cloud for the first time, extending the flexibility, scalability, and cost benefits of AWS to all Apple developers. With EC2 Mac instances, developers creating apps for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, Apple TV, and Safari can provision and access macOS environments within minutes, dynamically scale capacity as needed, and benefit from AWS’s pay-as-you-go pricing.

EC2 Mac instances are built on Apple Mac minicomputers featuring Intel Core i7 processors, and offer customers a choice of both macOS Mojave (10.14) and macOS Catalina (10.15) operating systems, with support for macOS Big Sur (11.0) coming soon

History: Announcing Amazon EC2 Mac instances for macOS

November 30th, 2020

Use Amazon EC2 Mac Instances to Build & Test macOS, iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, and watchOS Apps

Time and resources previously spent building and maintaining on-premises macOS environments can now be refocused on building creative and useful apps. Development teams can now seamlessly provision and access macOS compute environments to enjoy convenient, distributed testing and fast app builds, bringing additional choice to developers so they can use Mac as their trusted platform, on-premises or in the cloud. EC2 Mac instances offload the heavy lifting that comes with managing infrastructure to AWS, which means Apple developers can focus entirely on building great apps.

EC2 Mac instances allow developers to launch macOS environments within minutes, adjust provisioned capacity as needed, and only pay for actual usage with AWS’s pay-as-you-go pricing. Developers save money since they only need to pay for the systems that are in use. For example, more capacity can be used when building an app, and less capacity when testing.

EC2 Mac instances provide developers with seamless access to dozens of AWS services so they can more easily and efficiently collaborate with team members, and develop, build, test, analyze, and improve their apps. Similar to other EC2 instances, customers can easily use EC2 Mac instances together with AWS services and features like Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) for network security, Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) for expandable storage, Amazon Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) for distributing build queues, Amazon FSx for scalable file storage, and AWS Systems Manager (SSM) for configuring, managing, and patching macOS environments.

Amazon EC2 Mac instances are built on Apple Mac mini computers, featuring 8th Generation 3.2GHz (4.6GHz turbo) Intel Core i7 processors with 6 physical/12 logical cores, and 32GiB of Memory.

The AWS Nitro System is a rich collection of building blocks that offloads many of the traditional software-defined functions to dedicated hardware and software to deliver high performance, high availability, and high security. Amazon EC2 Mac instances are uniquely enabled by the AWS Nitro System, which makes it possible to offer Mac mini computers as fully integrated and managed EC2 instances to provide 10 Gbps of VPC network bandwidth and 8 Gbps of EBS storage bandwidth.

EC2 Mac instances are designed so that customers can build critical applications with confidence. AWS has the most secure, extensive, and reliable global infrastructure for running workloads that require high availability, and is recognized as an industry leader for uptime standards. EC2 Mac instances enable your macOS workloads to benefit from the scale, elasticity, reliability, and experience that AWS’s secure, on-demand infrastructure has offered to millions of customers for more than a decade.

EC2 Mac instances are available today in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), EU (Ireland), and Asia-Pacific (Singapore) AWS Regions as EC2 Dedicated Hosts with a minimum host allocation duration of 24 hours. EC2 Mac instances are available for purchase On-Demand or as part of Savings Plan (1 year and 3 year).