Announced at re:Invent 2020, AWS new EC2 Mac Instances enable running macOS on Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute to build, test, package, and sign Xcode applications for Apple platforms, including macOS, iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, watchOS, and Safari.

EC2 Mac Instances are powered by physical Mac Minis that developers get exclusive access to while they are using them. As with other instances, EC2 Mac Instances integrate with the EC2 platform through the AWS Nitro System.

You can use these instances to create build farms, render farms, and CI/CD farms that target all of the Apple environments that I mentioned earlier. You can provision new instances in minutes, giving you the ability to quickly & cost-effectively build code for multiple targets without having to own & operate your own hardware.

Each Mac Mini runs macOS 10.14 or macOS 10.15 with 32GB of memory and an 8th generation, 6-core Intel Core i7 (Coffee Lake) processor clocked at 3.2 GHz, with Turbo Boost up to 4.6 GHz. At the moment, no instances powered by the new Apple M1 chip are available, although they will be in the course of 2021, says chief AWS evangelist Jeff Barr.

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