Develop, build, test, and sign Apple apps on Amazon EC2

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.

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) and later as Amazon Machine Images (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. These Mac instances support macOS Big Sur (version 11) and later as Amazon Machine Images (AMIs).

Benefits

Quickly provision macOS environments

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.

Extend your toolkits

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.

Simplify rearchitecting, building, and testing for Apple silicon

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.

Reduce costs

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.

Features

Choice of Apple Mac hardware

EC2 Mac instances support multiple Apple Mac computers to address diverse use cases and requirements. Our x86-based EC2 Mac instances are built on Apple Mac mini computers, which feature 32 GiB of memory and eighth-generation 3.2 GHz Intel Core i7 processors with 6 physical and 12 logical cores. EC2 M1 Mac instances are built on Apple M1 Mac mini computers with the Apple silicon M1 chip, 8 CPU cores, 8 GPU cores, 16 GiB of memory, and the 16-core Apple Neural Engine. EC2 M1 Ultra Mac instances are built on Apple M1 Ultra Mac Studio computers with the Apple silicon M1 Ultra chip, 20 CPU cores, 64 GPU cores, 128 GiB of memory, and the 32-core Apple Neural Engine. EC2 M2 Pro Mac instances are built upon Apple M2 Pro Mac Mini computers with the Apple Silicon M2 Pro Chip, 12 CPU cores, 19 GPU cores, 32 GiB of memory, and 16-core Apple Neural Engine. EC2 M2 Mac instances are built on Apple M2 Mac mini computers with the Apple silicon M2 Chip, 8 CPU cores, 10 GPU cores, 24 GiB of memory, and the 16-core Apple Neural Engine. EC2 M2 Pro Mac instances are built upon Apple M2 Pro Mac Mini computers with the Apple Silicon M2 Pro Chip, 12 CPU cores, 19 GPU cores, 32 GiB of memory, and 16-core Apple Neural Engine.

Scaled on highly reliable infrastructure

EC2 Mac instances are designed so that you can build critical applications with confidence. AWS has the most secure, extensive, and reliable global infrastructure for running workloads that require high availability and is recognized as an industry leader for uptime standards. EC2 Mac instances let your macOS workloads benefit from the scale, elasticity, reliability, and experience that our secure, on-demand infrastructure has offered to millions of customers for more than a decade.

Enabled by the AWS Nitro System

The AWS Nitro System is a rich collection of building blocks that offloads many traditional, software-defined functions to dedicated hardware and software to deliver high performance, high availability, and high security. Amazon EC2 Mac instances are uniquely enabled by the AWS Nitro System, which makes it possible to offer Mac mini computers as fully integrated and managed EC2 instances, providing 10 Gbps of Amazon VPC network bandwidth and 8 Gbps of Amazon EBS storage bandwidth.