Developers will now have a virtual environment to leverage for designing apps for the Mac, iPhone, and other Apple devices, powered by Mac Minis.

What Happened: Amazon Expands App Development & Testing Capabilities with Native Mac Instances for AWS

On Monday’s reInvent Kickoff, Amazon announced the availability of macOS instances on AWS via the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), a welcomed alternative to Microsoft Windows and open-source Linux. Powered by Mac mini hardware and the AWS Nitro System, these Amazon EC2 Mac instances can be used to build, test, package, and sign Xcode applications for the Apple platform including macOS, iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, watchOS, and Safari.

Why It’s Important

Since no other major cloud provider has computing instances running MacOS, Apple Developers have a whole new world of opportunities to develop & test creative applications faster and AWS Partners will be able to provide more powerful development capabilities for clients. It’s a competitive win-win for everyone – AWS, AWS consulting partners, the development community as a whole, and the users who will eventually use the apps.

With this, the Mac minis operate as fully integrated and managed instances like other Amazon EC2 instances, enabling developers to natively run macOS in Amazon Web Services. With immediate access to the virtual macOS environments to build and test applications, development teams and organizations can innovate more quickly and bring products faster to market.

Apple developers benefit from the flexibility, scalability, security, reliability and cost benefits of AWS.

Availability

Mac instances are available On-Demand at a rate of $1.083 per hour or with Savings Plans. Currently offering macOS Mojave (10.14) and macOS Catalina (10.15) operating systems. Supported regions include the U.S. East (N. Virginia), U.S. East (Ohio), U.S. West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Singapore) with more to come. Learn more in the featured AWS Video or contact an Idexcel expert to get started.