There was a surprise announcement at Amazon Web Services (AWS) “re:Invent” virtual conference. AWS said it was bringing the Mac mini to its Cloud. The obvious target is developers who want Cloud-based development & testing environments for their Mac & iOS apps. AWS, known for its Cloud environment, wants to keep its lead over rivals.
Called, “Mac Instance”, Amazon said on its blog that the decision to introduce it was based on feedback given over the last 2 years by AWS users who wanted AWS that they wanted to be able to run macOS on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).
Powered by Mac mini hardware & the AWS Nitro System, developers can use Amazon EC2 Mac instances to build, test, package, & sign Xcode applications for the Apple platform including macOS, iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, watchOS, & Safari.
The instances feature an 8th generation, 6-core Intel Core i7 (Coffee Lake) processor running at 3.2 GHz, with Turbo Boost up to 4.6 GHz. There’s 32 GiB of memory & access to other AWS services including Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), Amazon Elastic File System (EFS), Amazon FSx for Windows File Server, Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), AWS Systems Manager, etc.
On the networking side, the instances run in a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) & include ENA networking with up to 10 Gbps of throughput.
To read more about this announcement, click here.
Image credit: AWS
