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AWS (Amazon Web Services) today opened it's re:Invent conference with a surprise announcement: the company is bringing the Mac mini to its cloud. These new EC2 Mac instances, as AWS calls them, are now available in preview.
Mac instances run macOS 10.14 (Mojave) and 10.15 (Catalina) and can be accessed via the command line (SSH) or remote desktop (VNC)
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.
Pricing
Unlike with other EC2 instances, whenever you spin up a new Mac instance, you have to pre-pay for the first 24 hours to get started. After those first 24 hours, prices are by the second, just like with any other instance type AWS offers today.
AWS will charge $1.083 per hour, billed by the second. That’s just under $26 to spin up a machine and run it for 24 hours.
EC2 MAC Instances Availablilty
The new Mac instances are now available in a number of AWS regions. These include
- US East (N. Virginia)
- US East (Ohio)
- US West (Oregon),
- Europe (Ireland),
- Asia Pacific (Singapore)
with other regions to follow soon.
Benefits of EC2 MAC Instances
CI/CD (Continuous Integration & Continuous Delivery)
CI/CD for iOS will save you days of preparing app submissions, fixing critical bugs, and uploading screenshots to the App Store. Automating these processes means that any member of the team will be able to release bug fixes or updates.
