Amazon now offers virtual M2 Macs as a service..

Amazon EC2 has today begun to offer Amazon EC2 M2 Pro Mac instances, following the introduction of M1 Mac instances a couple of years ago. The company says these instances deliver up to 35 percent faster performance over the existing M1 Mac instances when building and testing applications for Apple platforms.

Faster Macs in the cloud

These instances are powered by Mac minis running M2 Pro chips. That means 12 core CPU, 19 core GPU, 32 GiB of memory, and 16 core Apple Neural Engines. The online/cloud aspect of this is supported by Amazon Nitro systems through high-speed Thunderbolt connections, offering these Mac mini computers as fully integrated and managed compute instances with up to 10 Gbps of Amazon VPC network bandwidth and up to 8 Gbps of Amazon EBS storage bandwidth.

When Peter DeSantis first announced Amazon EC2 instances, he said:

“We did not need to make any changes to the Mac hardware. We simply connected a Nitro controller via the Mac’s Thunderbolt connection. When you launch a Mac instance, your Mac-compatible Amazon Machine Image (AMI) runs directly on the Mac Mini, with no hypervisor. The Nitro controller sets up the instance and provides secure access to the network and any storage attached. And that Mac Mini can now natively use any AWS service.”

Faster, better, and cheaper

With EC2 Mac instances, Amazon claims customers can scale their iOS build fleet; easily use custom macOS environments with AMIs; and debug any build or test failures with fully reproducible macOS environments.

“Customers have reported up to 4x reduction in build times, up to 3x increase in parallel builds, up to 80 percent reduction in machine-related build failures, and up to 50 percent reduction in fleet size,” the company said.

Amazon EC2 M2 Pro Mac instances are available in the US West (Oregon) and US East (Ohio) AWS Regions, with additional regions coming soon.

To learn more or get started, see Amazon EC2 Mac Instances or visit the EC2 Mac documentation.  You can send feedback to AWS re:Post for EC2 or through your usual AWS Support contacts.

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