Amazon Brings macOS to Cloud in a Boost to Apple App Developers

Amazon will run Apple’s macOS on its cloud service for the first time, allowing app developers for Apple’s devices to access the operating system on demand, the company’s cloud unit Amazon Web Services said on Monday.

The service, called Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Mac instances, runs on Mac mini computers and will support developers creating apps for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, Apple TV, and Safari, the cloud unit said.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) said it will use the version of Mac mini computers with Intel’s eighth-generation 3.2GHz Core i7 processors for EC2 Mac instances.

“With EC2 Mac instances, developers can … focus on creating groundbreaking apps for Apple’s industry-leading platforms, rather than procuring and managing the underlying infrastructure,” David Brown, vice president of EC2 at AWS, said.

AWS said cloud support for devices with Apple’s new M1 chip is in the works, with a launch planned for 2021.

AWS recently faced a widespread outage last week, affecting users ranging from websites to software providers. The company said that it also affected the ability to post updates to its service health dashboard.

“Kinesis has been experiencing increased error rates this morning in our US-East-1 Region that’s impacted some other AWS services. We are working toward resolution,” an AWS spokesperson said in a statement. Amazon Kinesis, a part of its cloud offerings, collects, processes, and analyses real-time data and offers insights.

Video-streaming device maker Roku, Adobe’s Spark platform, video-hosting website Flickr and the Baltimore Sun newspaper were among those hit by the outage, according to their posts on Twitter.