AWS Announces Mac Instances for Amazon EC2

Amazon EC2 Mac instances enable Apple developers to natively run macOS within AWS—extending the flexibility and scalability of the cloud with pay-as-you-go pricing to all Apple developers

Intuit, Ring, and FiLMiC among customers using EC2 Mac instances

At AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company, announced new Mac instances (EC2 Mac instances) for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Built on Mac mini computers, EC2 Mac instances enable customers to run on-demand macOS workloads in the AWS cloud for the first time ever, 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 now provision and access macOS environments within seconds, dynamically scale capacity as needed, and benefit from AWS’s pay-as-you-go pricing. To get started with EC2 Mac instances.

Today, millions of developers rely on Apple’s industry-leading platforms and tools such as Xcode and Swift, and powerful frameworks like Core ML and Metal, to create the world’s most amazing apps for over a billion customers globally. Now with EC2 Mac instances, AWS customers can run macOS workloads on AWS and benefit from the scale, elasticity, reliability, and experience that AWS’s secure, on-demand infrastructure has offered to millions of customers for more than a decade. Customers can seamlessly provision and access macOS compute environments to enjoy convenient, distributed testing and fast app builds, bringing additional choice to developers so they can use Mac as their trusted platform, on-premises or in the cloud. Customers can also consolidate development of cross-platform Apple, Windows, and Android apps onto AWS, leading to increased developer productivity and accelerated time to market. Similar to other Amazon EC2 instances, customers can easily use EC2 Mac instances together with AWS services and features like Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) for network security, Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) for expandable storage, Amazon Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) for distributing build queues, and Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) for OS image orchestration. The availability of EC2 Mac instances also offloads the heavy lifting that comes with managing infrastructure to AWS, which means Apple developers can focus entirely on building great apps.

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“Our customers tell us they would love to have their Apple build environment integrated with AWS services,” said David Brown, Vice President of EC2, at AWS. “With EC2 Mac instances, developers can now provision and access on-demand macOS compute environments in AWS for the first time ever, so they can focus on creating groundbreaking apps for Apple’s industry-leading platforms, rather than procuring and managing the underlying infrastructure.”

“Apple’s thriving community of more than 28 million developers continues to create groundbreaking app experiences that delight customers around the world,” said Bob Borchers, Vice President, Worldwide Product Marketing, at Apple. “With the launch of EC2 Mac instances, we’re thrilled to make development for Apple’s platforms accessible in new ways, and combine the performance and reliability of our world-class hardware with the scalability of AWS.”

EC2 Mac instances are powered by a combination of Mac mini computers—featuring Intel’s eighth-generation 3.2GHz (4.6GHz turbo) Core i7 processors, 6 physical/12 logical cores, and 32 GiB of memory—and the AWS Nitro System, providing up to 10 Gbps of VPC network bandwidth and 8 Gbps of EBS storage bandwidth through high speed Thunderbolt 3 connections. Amazon EC2 Mac instances are uniquely enabled by the AWS Nitro System, which makes it possible to offer Mac mini computers as a fully integrated and managed compute instances with Amazon VPC networking and Amazon EBS storage just like any other Amazon EC2 instance. EC2 Mac instances are available to be purchased On-Demand or with Savings Plans. EC2 Mac instances are available now in the US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Singapore) regions, with other regions coming soon.

Intuit is a mission-driven, global financial platform company. Its products—including TurboTax, QuickBooks, and Mint—are designed to empower more than 50 million consumer, small business and self-employed customers around the world to improve their financial lives. “EC2 Mac instances, with their familiar EC2 interfaces and APIs, have enabled us to seamlessly migrate our existing iOS and macOS build-and-test pipelines to AWS, further improving developer productivity,” said Pratik Wadher, Vice President of Product Development at Intuit. “We‘re experiencing up to 30 percent better performance over our data center infrastructure, thanks to elastic capacity expansion, and a high availability setup leveraging multiple zones. We’re now running around 80 percent of our production builds on EC2 Mac instances, and are excited to see what the future holds for AWS innovation in this space.”

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Since its founding in 2013, Ring has been on a mission to make neighborhoods safer, together for everyone. “At Ring, we are committed to making home and neighborhood security accessible and effective for everyone—while working hard to bring communities together,” said Joshua Roth, Chief Technology Officer, at Ring. “EC2 Mac instances will allow us to migrate our Apple build infrastructure to AWS, unlocking the scalability, reliability, security, and capabilities of AWS for all our Apple developers. These EC2 Mac instances will also let us quickly scale up our Mac build fleet whenever we need it, simplify cross-platform app development through consolidation on a single infrastructure provider, and ultimately accelerate innovations for thousands of our Apple customers.”

FiLMiC Inc. is the creator of the award-winning mobile cinema camera app, FiLMiC Pro. “With a global team of filmmakers, photographers, creatives, and software developers who share the same passion for mobile cinema and content creation, FiLMiC has designed what has become the industry’s most sought-after app that transforms a simple mobile device into a cinematic film camera,” said Seth Faxon, iOS Development Manager for FiLMiC. “EC2 Mac instances give us the ability to scale up our continuous integration build farm in order to quickly go through development, testing and TestFlight stages. This leads to better velocity and more time working on the fun stuff.”

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