Yesterday, Amazon lifted the curtain on its new Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances built on Apple's Mac Mini. Amazon calls them Mac EC2 instances, and they're the result of a steady push by customers to bring macOS to the cloud. EC2 instances for Mac will extend the benefits of having your development environment on EC2 to developers working on iOS and Mac applications. However, the new Mac instances will not be powered by the recently released Mac Minis M1, but by previous iterations. They use 7th generation Intel Core i3.2 XNUMX GHz processors.
Apple Silicon is coming soon
That said, Amazon is reportedly working on powering Mac instances using the new M1-powered devices. The new devices are rumored to debut in the data center in the first quarter of 2021. In a blog post detailing the offering, AWS Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr wrote that the minis run macOS 10.14 (Mojave) and 10.15. (Katherine). Also, although it was not mentioned in the press release, we are gathering reports that these are mini Macs stored in Amazon's data center with only their Wi-Fi and Bluetooth turned off. While Amazon hasn't officially shared pricing details for the new Mac instances, it's reported that AWS will charge just over $1/hour, billed per second. Unlike other AWS instances, however, users will need to pay upfront for the first 24 hours each time they launch a new Mac instance. Amazon is launching the service with three customers, and EC2 Mac instances are currently only available for customers in limited geographies. “Our customers tell us that they would like their Apple build environment to integrate with AWS services,” said David Brown, vice president of EC2 at AWS. “With EC2 Mac instances, developers can now provision and access macOS compute-on-demand environments on AWS for the first time, so they can focus on developing innovative applications for platforms. advanced technology, rather than acquiring and managing the underlying infrastructure. "Apple's thriving community of more than 28 million developers continues to create revolutionary app experiences that delight customers around the world," said Bob Borchers, Apple's vice president of Global Product Marketing. With EC2 Mac instances, we're excited to make building on Apple platforms accessible in new ways and to combine the performance and reliability of our world-class hardware with the scalability of AWS." Via: TechCrunch