Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

Develop, build, test, and sign Apple apps on Amazon EC2
Get started with Mac Instances

Why Amazon EC2 Mac Instances?

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Mac instances allow you to run on-demand macOS workloads in the cloud for the first time, extending the flexibility, scalability, and cost benefits of AWS to all Apple developers. By using Amazon EC2 Mac instances, you can create apps for the iPhone, iPad, Mac, Vision Pro, Apple Watch, Apple TV, and Safari. You can provision and access macOS environments within minutes, dynamically scale capacity as needed, and benefit from pay-as-you-go pricing.

To get started with EC2 Mac instances, please see Amazon EC2 User Guide or visit the Amazon EC2 macOS FAQs to learn more. 

Supported Amazon EC2 Mac instances

Amazon EC2 M2 Pro Mac Instances

Amazon EC2 M2 Pro Mac Instances are built on Apple M2 Pro Mac mini computers and are powered by the AWS Nitro system. M2 Pro Mac instances combine native Arm64 macOS environments with 32GiB of RAM, delivering up to 35% faster performance compared to EC2 M1 Mac instances for iOS and macOS application build workloads. EC2 M2 Pro Mac instances support macOS version 13.2 and later as Amazon Machine Images (AMIs).

Amazon EC2 M2 Mac Instances

Amazon EC2 M2 Mac Instances are built on Apple M2 Mac mini computers and are powered by the AWS Nitro System. M2 Mac instances combine native Arm64 macOS environments with 24GiB of RAM, delivering up to 10% faster performance compared to EC2 M1 Mac instances for iOS and macOS application build workloads. EC2 M2 Mac instances support macOS version 13.2 and later as Amazon Machine Images (AMIs).

Amazon EC2 M1 Ultra Mac Instances

Amazon EC2 M1 Ultra Mac Instances are built on Apple M1 Ultra Mac Studio computers and are powered by the AWS Nitro System. M1 Ultra Mac instances combine native Arm64 macOS environments with 128GiB of RAM. EC2 M1 Ultra Mac instances support macOS Ventura (version 13) and later as Amazon Machine Images (AMIs).

Amazon EC2 M1 Mac instances

Amazon EC2 M1 Mac instances are built on Apple M1 Mac mini computers and are powered by the AWS Nitro System. These instances deliver up to 60% better price performance over x86-based EC2 Mac instances for iOS and macOS application build workloads. EC2 M1 Mac instances enable Arm64 macOS environments for the first time on AWS, and support macOS Big Sur (version 11), macOS Monterey (version 12), macOS Ventura (version 13), and macOS Sonoma (version 14) as AMIs.

x86-based EC2 Mac instances

x86-based EC2 Mac instances are built on Apple Mac mini computers, featuring Intel Core i7 processors, and are powered by the AWS Nitro System. You can choose from Mac instances that can run on macOS Big Sur (version 11), macOS Monterey (version 12), macOS Ventura (version 13), and macOS Sonoma (version 14) as AMIs.

Overview of Amazon EC2 Mac Instances

Get started with Amazon EC2 Mac instances quickly

Visit our GitHub repository for helpful technical documents, guides, videos, and more. Learn how to setup Apple developer environments, build CI/CD pipelines, or test your Jamf workflows on x86 and Apple silicon-based EC2 Mac instances.

Benefits

Time and resources previously spent building and maintaining on-premises macOS environments can now be refocused on building creative and useful apps. Development teams can now seamlessly provision and access macOS compute environments on demand to enjoy convenient distributed testing and fast app builds. This brings additional choices to developers so they can use Mac as their trusted platform, on premises or in the cloud. EC2 Mac instances help offload the effort in managing infrastructure to AWS, so Apple developers can focus on building their applications.

EC2 Mac instances provide developers with seamless access to dozens of AWS services, so developers can more easily and efficiently collaborate with team members and develop, build, test, analyze, and improve their apps. Similar to other EC2 instances, you can use EC2 Mac instances together with AWS services and features, such as Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) for network security, Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) for expandable storage, Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) for distributing build queues, Amazon FSx for scalable file storage, and AWS Systems Manager Agent (SSM Agent) for configuring, managing, and patching macOS environments.

EC2 M1, M1 Ultra, M2, and M2 Pro Mac instances enable Apple Silicon macOS environments on AWS to develop, build, test, deploy, and run Apple applications. When rearchitecting your macOS applications for Apple silicon Mac computers, you can now achieve faster builds with bare-metal performance and convenient distributed testing without having to procure, install, manage, patch, and upgrade the physical infrastructure.

EC2 Mac instances allow developers to launch macOS environments within minutes, adjust provisioned capacity as needed, and only pay for actual usage with pay-as-you-go pricing. Developers save money since they only need to pay for the systems that are in use. For example, more capacity can be used when building an app, and less capacity when testing.