Developers can now build across all Apple’s products using hosted Mac minis on AWS.
AWS has become the latest enterprise player in the Mac space, offering up Mac minis in the cloud to developers seeking cloud-based infrastructure. Amazon’s “Mac mini as a service” is available now, reflecting Apple’s continued growth in enterprise computing. It marks the first time AWS has offered to run macOS on demand in the cloud and can be scaled, accessed on a pay-as-you-go basis and lets developers access dozens of additional AWS services. These Mac instances can be used to build, test, package, and sign Xcode applications for the Apple platform including macOS, iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, watchOS, and Safari. The service aims to “speed up the dev lifecycle’ for apps developers on Apple’s platforms. Here’s what Amazon says: “Our customers tell us they would love to have their Apple build environment integrated with AWS services,” said David Brown, Vice President of EC2, at AWS. “With EC2 Mac instances, developers can now provision and access on-demand macOS compute environments in AWS for the first time ever, so they can focus on creating groundbreaking apps for Apple’s industry-leading platforms, rather than procuring and managing the underlying infrastructure.” And here’s how Apple reacts: “Apple’s thriving community of more than 28 million developers continues to create groundbreaking app experiences that delight customers around the world,” said Bob Borchers, Vice President, Worldwide Product Marketing, at Apple. “With the launch of EC2 Mac instances, we’re thrilled to make development for Apple’s platforms accessible in new ways, and combine the performance and reliability of our world-class hardware with the scalability of AWS.
