Amazon Web Services today announced that it has added new Mac mini instances for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. This will enable customers to run on-demand macOS workloads in the AWS cloud for the first time.
EC2 Mac instances allow developers that are creating apps for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, Apple TV, and Safari to provision and access macOS environments within minutes, dynamically scale capacity as needed, and take advantage of AWS’s pay-as-you-go pricing.
The new EC2 Mac instances are powered by Intel-based Mac mini machines with 3.2GHz processors and 32GB RAM, along with the AWS Nitro System for 10Gb/s VPC network bandwidth and 8Gb/s storage bandwidth.
In addition to the Intel-based Mac minis, Amazon is working on adding new M1 Mac minis into its data centers. AWS says the current plan is to roll the new M1 Mac minis out early next year. AWS believes developers will continue to require Intel machines for the foreseeable future.
Customers can use EC2 Mac instances with AWS services and features like Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, Amazon Elastic Block Storage, Amazon Machine Images, and more.
Amazon vice president of EC2 at AWS David Brown said that developers can focus on creating apps rather than managing infrastructure.
“Our customers tell us they would love to have their Apple build environment integrated with AWS services. With EC2 Mac instances, developers can now provision and access on-demand macOS compute environments in AWS for the first time ever, so they can focus on creating groundbreaking apps for Apple’s industry-leading platforms, rather than procuring and managing the underlying infrastructure.”
Meanwhile, as you can imagine, Apple is happy about this, as Apple vice president of worldwide product marketing Bob Borchers said in a statement that Apple is “thrilled” to make development for Apple’s platforms accessible “in new ways.”
“Apple’s thriving community of more than 28 million developers continues to create groundbreaking app experiences that delight customers around the world. With the launch of EC2 Mac instances, we’re thrilled to make development for Apple’s platforms accessible in new ways, and combine the performance and reliability of our world-class hardware with the scalability of AWS.”
EC2 Mac instances can be purchased On-Demand or with Savings Plans and are available now in the US East (Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Singapore) regions. AWS will charge $1.083 per hour, billed by the second. That’s just under $26 to initiate a machine and run it for 24 hours.
(Via TechCrunch)