macOS in Amazon’s cloud

David Brown, AWS Vice-President. © Amazon.

For the first time ever, Amazon has introduced macOS instances in its AWS cloud. The new “mac1.metal” is not virtualized; it’s actual Mac Minis accessed on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which will allow developers to build iPhone, iPad and Mac applications on AWS. These Mac Minis don’t have Apple’s new M1; they’re the Intel-based model, each with an 8th-generation Core i7, 32GB of RAM and 10Gbps network interface. The instances don’t offer local storage, instead relying on Elastic Block Storage accessed at 8Gbps via Thunderbolt 3. Developers can choose either macOS Mojave or macOS Catalina — with Big Sur coming soon. Amazon also plans on providing M1 machines in 2021. Like other Amazon instance types, they’re automatically provisioned with an SSH keypair, and most customers will shell into the Minis just as they might to a Linux VM. But you can also enable VNC and remote control your mac1.metal instance just as you would any other desktop Mac. Intuit, maker of TurboTax, QuickBooks and Mint, has already transferred 80% of its production builds to mac1.metal instances on EC2.

⇨ YouTube, “AWS EC2 Mac Instances Launch - macOS in the cloud for the first time, with the benefits of EC2.”

⇨ Ars Technica, Jim Salter, “Amazon Web Services adds macOS on bare metal to EC2.”