Amazon Web Services adds macOS on bare metal to EC2

Amazon Web Services and Apple have teamed up to bring modern cloud provisioning capabilities to the macOS platform, with the launch on Tuesday morning of the new ECS instance type mac1.metal. Unlike Amazon’s usual cloud tariff, the newer instance types aren’t virtual machines at all – they’re Mac Mini systems, bolted in pairs on 1U rack-mounted sleds.

No, these are not Apple Silicon systems – the Minis in question are the Intel model, each with a Core i7-8700B 6c / 12t processor, 32GB of RAM, and a 10Gbps network interface. Mac1.metal instances do not offer local storage, but instead rely on Elastic Block Storage (EBS) accessible at 8 Gbps via high speed Thunderbolt 3. , in peripherals mounted on the sleds and connected via the external interfaces of the Minis.

While there’s no virtualization involved here, mac1.metal instances can be launched from top to bottom almost as quickly, thanks to AWS Nitro hardware management, which is invisible from the customer’s perspective. For someone launching a mac1.metal instance, the instance is for all intents and purposes a brand new perfectly vanilla Intel Mac Mini.

Like other types of Amazon instances, they are automatically provisioned with an SSH key pair, and most customers will break into Minis as they would a Linux VM. But the default image also includes all the normal, more desktop-oriented macOS components, if developers need or want them, they can enable VNC and remotely control their mac1.metal instance as they would any other Mac from. office. Customers can also create and deploy their own custom macOS images using AMI.

What are they for?

The most obvious application for new instance types is in appropriate and modern large-scale continuous integration / continuous deployment (CI / CD) generation farms. CI / CD on MacOS is nothing new, of course, but being able to deploy CI / CD build farms on EC2 means being able to get rid of on-premise closets full of hardware in small businesses. For larger companies, this means being able to deploy larger farms with more instances, as they can be rotated up and down on demand as needed.

Intuit, a maker of accounting software including TurboTax, QuickBooks, and Mint, has already migrated 80% of its production versions from on-premises or legacy leased hardware to mac.metal instances on EC2. Vice President of Product Development Pratik Wadher says the company is now experiencing “up to 30% better performance on our data center infrastructure”, thanks to elastic capacity expansion and high availability multi-zone made possible in EC2.

Filmic – the makers of apps used to shoot professional videos from iPhones, which you might know from iPhone 12 launch videos – have also migrated their own CI / CD pipeline to the new macOS instances. EC2. According to Seth Faxon, Director of iOS Development at Filmic, increasing the size of the EC2 build farm makes possible “better speed and more time working on the fun stuff.”