As we speak, we’re asserting the overall availability of Amazon EC2 M2 Professional Mac situations. These situations ship as much as 35 p.c sooner efficiency over the present M1 Mac situations when constructing and testing functions for Apple platforms.

New EC2 M2 Professional Mac situations are powered by Apple M2 Professional Mac Mini computer systems that includes 12 core CPU, 19 core GPU, 32 GiB of reminiscence, and 16 core Apple Neural Engine and uniquely enabled by the AWS Nitro System via high-speed Thunderbolt connections, providing these Mac mini computer systems as absolutely built-in and managed compute situations with as much as 10 Gbps of Amazon VPC community bandwidth and as much as 8 Gbps of Amazon EBS storage bandwidth. EC2 M2 Professional Mac situations help macOS Ventura (model 13.2 or later) as AMIs.

A Story of EC2 Mac Situations
When Jeff Barr first launched Amazon EC2 Mac Situations in 2020, clients had been shocked to have the ability to run macOS on Amazon EC2 to construct, check, package deal, and signal functions developed with Xcode functions for the Apple platform, together with macOS, iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, and watchOS.

In his keynote in AWS re:Invent 2020, Peter DeSantis revealed the key to construct EC2 Mac situations powered by the AWS Nitro System, which makes it attainable to supply Apple Mac mini computer systems as absolutely built-in and managed compute situations with Amazon VPC networking and Amazon EBS storage, identical to every other EC2 situations.

“We didn’t must make any modifications to the Mac {hardware}. We merely related a Nitro controller through the Mac’s Thunderbolt connection. While you launch a Mac occasion, your Mac-compatible Amazon Machine Picture (AMI) runs instantly on the Mac Mini, with no hypervisor. The Nitro controller units up the occasion and supplies safe entry to the community and any storage hooked up. And that Mac Mini can now natively use any AWS service.”

In July 2022, we launched Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Situations constructed across the Apple-designed M1 System on Chip (SoC). Builders constructing for iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Apple TV functions can select both x86-based EC2 Mac situations or Arm-based EC2 M1 situations. If you wish to re-architect your apps to natively help Macs with Apple Silicon utilizing EC2 M1 situations, you may construct and check your apps to ship as much as 60 p.c higher worth efficiency over the EC2 Mac situations for iPhone and Mac app construct workloads with all the advantages of AWS.

Many purchasers benefit from EC2 Mac situations to ship an entire end-to-end construct pipeline on macOS on AWS. With EC2 Mac situations, they’ll scale their iOS construct fleet; simply use customized macOS environments with AMIs; and debug any construct or check failures with absolutely reproducible macOS environments.

Prospects have reported as much as 4x discount in construct occasions, as much as 3x enhance in parallel builds, as much as 80 p.c discount in machine-related construct failures, and as much as 50 p.c discount in fleet measurement. They’ll proceed to prioritize their time on innovating merchandise and options whereas decreasing the tedious effort required to handle on-premises macOS infrastructure.

To speed up this innovation, EC2 Mac situations not too long ago started to help changing root volumes on a operating EC2 Mac occasion, enabling you to revive the basis quantity of an EC2 Mac occasion to its preliminary launch state or to a particular snapshot, with out requiring you to cease or terminate the occasion.

It’s also possible to use in-place working system updates from throughout the visitor surroundings on EC2 M1 Mac situations to a particular or newest macOS model, together with the beta model, by registering your situations with the Apple Developer Program. Builders can now combine the newest macOS options into their functions and check current functions for compatibility earlier than public macOS releases.

Getting Began with EC2 M2 Professional Situations
As with different EC2 Mac situations, EC2 M2 Professional Mac situations additionally help Devoted Host tenancy with a minimal host allocation period of 24 hours to align with macOS licensing.

To get began, you must allocate a Mac-dedicated host, a bodily server absolutely devoted on your personal use in your AWS account. After the host is allotted, you may launch, cease, and begin your individual macOS surroundings as one occasion on that host for one devoted host.

After the host is allotted, you can begin an EC2 Mac occasion on it. The process isn’t any completely different from beginning any EC2 occasion kind. Select your macOS AMI model and choose the mac2-m2pro.steel occasion kind within the Utility and OS Pictures part.

Within the Superior particulars part, choose Devoted host in Tenancy and a devoted host you simply created in Tenancy host ID.

While you use EC2 Mac situations for the primary time, you should use SSH to hook up with the newly launched occasion as ordinary or allow Apple Distant Desktop and begin a VNC session to the EC2 occasion. To study extra, see Sebastien’s collection of articles to launch and join your Mac occasion.

While you not want the Mac devoted host, you may terminate your operating Mac occasion and launch the underlying host. Notice once more that after being allotted, a Mac devoted host can solely be launched after 24 hours to align with Apple’s macOS licensing.

Now Accessible
Amazon EC2 M2 Professional Mac situations can be found within the US West (Oregon) and US East (Ohio) AWS Areas, with further areas coming quickly.

To study extra or get began, see Amazon EC2 Mac Situations or go to the EC2 Mac documentation.  You possibly can ship suggestions to AWS re:Submit for EC2 or via your ordinary AWS Help contacts.

— Channy