Posted On: Jul 7, 2022
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) M1 Mac instances are now generally available (GA). Built on Apple Silicon Mac mini computers and powered by the AWS Nitro System, Amazon EC2 M1 Mac instances deliver up to 60% better price performance over x86-based EC2 Mac instances for building and testing iOS and macOS applications. You still enjoy the same elasticity, scalability, and reliability that the secure, on-demand AWS infrastructure has offered to millions of customers for more than a decade. EC2 M1 Mac instances also enable native Arm64 macOS environments for the first time on AWS to develop, build, test, deploy, and run applications for Apple devices. As a developer who is rearchitecting your macOS applications to natively support Apple Silicon Macs, you can now provision Arm64 macOS environments within minutes, dynamically scale capacity as needed, and benefit from pay-as-you-go pricing to enjoy faster builds and convenient distributed testing. To learn more or get started, see Amazon EC2 Mac Instances.
Today, millions of Apple developers across the globe are excited about Apple’s transition to a new family of custom silicon designed specifically for the Mac, starting with the M1 system on a chip (SoC). M1 is the first personal computer SoC built by using the innovative 5-nanometer process technology, combining numerous powerful technologies into a single chip and featuring a unified memory architecture for improved performance and efficiency. The Apple-designed M1 SoC also enables the Arm64 architecture for the first time on macOS.
As an Apple developer, you can rearchitect your macOS applications to natively support Apple Silicon and enjoy faster builds, bare metal performance, and convenient distributed testing without having to procure, install, manage, patch, and upgrade any physical build infrastructure. You can also consolidate development of cross-platform Apple, Windows, and Android apps onto AWS, saving resources and time spent managing infrastructure, increasing productivity, and accelerating time to market. You can easily use EC2 M1 Mac instances in the same way as other EC2 instances with AWS services and features, such as Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) for network security, Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) for expandable storage, Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) for distributing build queues, and Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) for OS image orchestration.
EC2 M1 Mac instances use the combination of Apple Silicon Mac mini computers and the AWS Nitro System, which provides up to 10 Gbps of VPC network bandwidth and 8 Gbps of Amazon EBS storage bandwidth through high-speed Thunderbolt connections. The Mac mini computers feature the M1 processor with 8 CPU cores, 8 GPU cores, 16 GiB of memory, and the 16-core Apple Neural Engine. Amazon EC2 M1 Mac instances are uniquely enabled by the AWS Nitro System, offering these Mac mini computers as fully integrated and managed compute instances with Amazon VPC networking and Amazon EBS storage, like any other EC2 instance. EC2 M1 Mac instances support both macOS Big Sur version 11 and macOS Monterey version 12 as AMIs.
EC2 M1 Mac instances are available in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Europe (Dublin), and Asia Pacific (Singapore) AWS Regions, with additional Regions coming soon.
To learn more or get started, see Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances.