Amazon offers EC2 Mac instances based on Mac mini with Intel hexacores

Amazon is starting to offer macOS on its Elastic Compute Cloud service. The company has placed Mac minis with Intel Core i7s running macOS 10.14 and 10.15 in its data centers.

Amazon reports that it has added macOS to its EC2 offering because it would be in demand among users. They can develop and test apps with EC2 Mac instances, for example, whether they are written for macOS or the other platforms of Apple. The instances run on Mac mini hardware and the AWS Nitro System.

The Mac minis include Coffee Lake-generation Intel Core i7 hexacores, so it’s not just Apple’s recent Mac minis with its own M1 socs. Those instances will be available next year, Amazon promises. The models also do not run the latest version of macOS, Big Sur, but macOS Mojave and Catalina. The operating systems can be accessed via ssh or vnc. There is 32GB of memory available.

As advantages over purchasing proprietary hardware, Amazon cites scalability and access to other AWS services such as Amazon Elastic Block Store, Amazon Elastic File System, Amazon FSx for Windows File Server, Amazon Simple Storage Service and AWS Systems Manager.