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As somebody who has been utilizing macOS since 2001 and Amazon EC2 Mac situations since their launch 4 years in the past, I’ve helped quite a few prospects scale their steady integration and supply (CI/CD) pipelines on AWS. At this time, I’m excited to share that Amazon EC2 M4 and M4 Professional Mac situations are actually typically out there.
Improvement groups constructing purposes for Apple platforms want highly effective computing assets to deal with advanced construct processes and run a number of iOS simulators concurrently. As growth initiatives develop bigger and extra refined, groups require elevated efficiency and reminiscence capability to keep up fast growth cycles.
Apple M4 Mac mini on the core
EC2 M4 Mac situations (referred to as mac-m4.metallic within the API) are constructed on Apple M4 Mac mini computer systems and are constructed on the AWS Nitro System. They function Apple silicon M4 chips with 10-core CPU (4 efficiency and 6 effectivity cores), 10-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine, and 24 GB unified reminiscence, delivering enhanced efficiency for iOS and macOS utility construct workloads. When constructing and testing purposes, M4 Mac situations ship as much as 20 % higher utility construct efficiency in comparison with EC2 M2 Mac situations.
EC2 M4 Professional Mac (mac-m4pro.metallic within the API) situations are powered by Apple silicon M4 Professional chips with 14-core CPU, 20-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine, and 48 GB unified reminiscence. These situations provide as much as 15 % higher utility construct efficiency in comparison with EC2 M2 Professional Mac situations. The elevated reminiscence and computing energy make it attainable to run extra exams in parallel utilizing a number of gadget simulators.
Every M4 and M4 Professional Mac occasion now comes with 2 TB of native storage, offering low-latency storage for improved caching and construct and check efficiency.
Each occasion varieties assist macOS Sonoma model 15.6 and later as Amazon Machine Photos (AMIs). The AWS Nitro System supplies as much as 10 Gbps of Amazon Digital Personal Cloud (Amazon VPC) community bandwidth and eight Gbps of Amazon Elastic Block Retailer (Amazon EBS) storage bandwidth via high-speed Thunderbolt connections.
Amazon EC2 Mac situations combine seamlessly with AWS providers, which suggests you possibly can:
Let me present you the right way to get began
You’ll be able to launch an EC2 M4 or M4 Professional Mac situations via the AWS Administration Console, AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), or AWS SDKs.
For this demo, let’s begin an M4 Professional occasion from the console. I first allocate a devoted host to run my situations. On the AWS Administration Console, I navigate to EC2, then Devoted Hosts, and I choose Allocate Devoted Host.
Then, I enter a Identify tag and I choose the Occasion household (mac-m4pro) and an Occasion sort (mac-m4pro.metallic). I select one Availability Zone and I clear Host upkeep.
Alternatively, I can use the command line interface:
aws ec2 allocate-hosts
--availability-zone-id "usw2-az4"
--auto-placement "off"
--host-recovery "off"
--host-maintenance "off"
--quantity 1
--instance-type "mac-m4pro.metallic"After the devoted host is allotted to my account, I choose the host I simply allotted, then I choose the Actions menu and select Launch occasion(s) onto host.
Discover the console provides you, amongst different data, the Newest supported macOS variations for one of these host. On this case, it’s macOS 15.6.
On the Launch an occasion web page, I enter a Identify. I choose a macOS Sequoia Amazon Machine Picture (AMI). I ensure the Structure is 64-bit Arm and the Occasion sort is mac-m4pro.metallic.
The remainder of the parameters arn’t particular to Amazon EC2 Mac: the community and storage configuration. When beginning an occasion for growth use, be sure to choose a quantity with minimal 200 Gb or extra. The default 100 Gb quantity dimension isn’t ample to obtain and set up Xcode.
When prepared, I choose the Launch occasion orange button on the underside of the web page. The occasion will quickly seem as Working within the console. Nevertheless, it would take as much as quarter-hour to assist you to join over SSH.
Alternatively, I can use this command:
aws ec2 run-instances
--image-id "ami-000420887c24e4ac8" # AMI ID is determined by the area !
--instance-type "mac-m4pro.metallic"
--key-name "my-ssh-key-name"
--network-interfaces '{"AssociatePublicIpAddress":true,"DeviceIndex":0,"Teams":["sg-0c2f1a3e01b84f3a3"]}' # Safety Group ID is determined by your config
--tag-specifications '{"ResourceType":"occasion","Tags":[{"Key":"Name","Value":"My Dev Server"}]}'
--placement '{"HostId":"h-0e984064522b4b60b","Tenancy":"host"}' # Host ID is determined by your config
--private-dns-name-options '{"HostnameType":"ip-name","EnableResourceNameDnsARecord":true,"EnableResourceNameDnsAAAARecord":false}'
--count "1" Set up Xcode from the Terminal
After the occasion is reachable, I can join utilizing SSH to it and set up my growth instruments. I take advantage of xcodeinstall to obtain and set up Xcode 16.4.
From my laptop computer, I open a session with my Apple developer credentials:
# on my laptop computer, with permissions to entry AWS Secret Supervisor
» xcodeinstall authenticate -s eu-central-1
Retrieving Apple Developer Portal credentials...
Authenticating...
🔐 Two components authentication is enabled, enter your 2FA code: 067785
✅ Authenticated with MFA.I hook up with the EC2 Mac occasion I simply launched. Then, I obtain and set up Xcode:
» ssh ec2-user@44.234.115.119
Warning: Completely added '44.234.115.119' (ED25519) to the record of recognized hosts.
Final login: Sat Aug 23 13:49:55 2025 from 81.49.207.77
┌───┬──┐ __| __|_ )
│ ╷╭╯╷ │ _| ( /
│ └╮ │ ___|___|___|
│ ╰─┼╯ │ Amazon EC2
└───┴──┘ macOS Sequoia 15.6
ec2-user@ip-172-31-54-74 ~ % brew faucet sebsto/macos
==> Tapping sebsto/macos
Cloning into '/decide/homebrew/Library/Faucets/sebsto/homebrew-macos'...
distant: Enumerating objects: 227, carried out.
distant: Counting objects: 100% (71/71), carried out.
distant: Compressing objects: 100% (57/57), carried out.
distant: Complete 227 (delta 22), reused 63 (delta 14), pack-reused 156 (from 1)
Receiving objects: 100% (227/227), 37.93 KiB | 7.59 MiB/s, carried out.
Resolving deltas: 100% (72/72), carried out.
Tapped 1 system (13 information, 61KB).
ec2-user@ip-172-31-54-74 ~ % brew set up xcodeinstall
==> Fetching downloads for: xcodeinstall
==> Fetching sebsto/macos/xcodeinstall
==> Downloading https://github.com/sebsto/xcodeinstall/releases/obtain/v0.12.0/xcodeinstall-0.12.0.arm64_sequoia.bottle.tar.gz
Already downloaded: /Customers/ec2-user/Library/Caches/Homebrew/downloads/9f68a7a50ccfdc479c33074716fd654b8528be0ec2430c87bc2b2fa0c36abb2d--xcodeinstall-0.12.0.arm64_sequoia.bottle.tar.gz
==> Putting in xcodeinstall from sebsto/macos
==> Pouring xcodeinstall-0.12.0.arm64_sequoia.bottle.tar.gz
🍺 /decide/homebrew/Cellar/xcodeinstall/0.12.0: 8 information, 55.2MB
==> Working `brew cleanup xcodeinstall`...
Disable this behaviour by setting `HOMEBREW_NO_INSTALL_CLEANUP=1`.
Cover these hints with `HOMEBREW_NO_ENV_HINTS=1` (see `man brew`).
==> No outdated dependents to improve!
ec2-user@ip-172-31-54-74 ~ % xcodeinstall obtain -s eu-central-1 -f -n "Xcode 16.4.xip"
Downloading Xcode 16.4
100% [============================================================] 2895 MB / 180.59 MBs
[ OK ]
✅ Xcode 16.4.xip downloaded
ec2-user@ip-172-31-54-74 ~ % xcodeinstall set up -n "Xcode 16.4.xip"
Putting in...
[1/6] Increasing Xcode xip (this would possibly take some time)
[2/6] Shifting Xcode to /Purposes
[3/6] Putting in extra packages... XcodeSystemResources.pkg
[4/6] Putting in extra packages... CoreTypes.pkg
[5/6] Putting in extra packages... MobileDevice.pkg
[6/6] Putting in extra packages... MobileDeviceDevelopment.pkg
[ OK ]
✅ file:///Customers/ec2-user/.xcodeinstall/obtain/Xcodepercent2016.4.xip put in
ec2-user@ip-172-31-54-74 ~ % sudo xcodebuild -license settle for
ec2-user@ip-172-31-54-74 ~ %
Issues to know
Choose an EBS quantity with minimal 200 Gb for growth functions. The 100 Gb default quantity dimension isn’t ample to put in Xcode. I normally choose 500 Gb. Whenever you improve the EBS quantity dimension after the launch of the occasion, bear in mind to resize the APFS filesystem.
Alternatively, you possibly can select to put in your growth instruments and framework on the low-latency native 2 Tb SSD drive out there within the Mac mini. Listen that the content material of that quantity is sure to the occasion lifecycle, not the devoted host. Because of this every part might be deleted from the inner SSD storage if you cease and restart the occasion.
Themac-m4.metallic and mac-m4pro.metallic situations assist macOS Sequoia 15.6 and later.
You’ll be able to migrate your present EC2 Mac situations when the migrated occasion runs macOS 15 (Sequoia). Create a customized AMI out of your present occasion and begin an M4 or M4 Professional occasion from this AMI.
Lastly, I recommend checking the tutorials I wrote that will help you to get began with Amazon EC2 Mac:
Pricing and availability
EC2 M4 and M4 Professional Mac situations are at the moment out there in US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon), with extra Areas deliberate for the longer term.
Amazon EC2 Mac situations can be found for buy as Devoted Hosts via the On-Demand and Financial savings Plans pricing fashions. Billing for EC2 Mac situations is per second with a 24-hour minimal allocation interval to adjust to the Apple macOS Software program License Settlement. On the finish of the 24-hour minimal allocation interval, the host will be launched at any time with no additional dedication
As somebody who works carefully with Apple builders, I’m curious to see the way you’ll use these new situations to speed up your growth cycles. The mixture of elevated efficiency, enhanced reminiscence capability, and integration with AWS providers opens new prospects for groups constructing purposes for iOS, macOS, iPadOS, tvOS, watchOS, and visionOS platforms. Past utility growth, Apple silicon’s Neural Engine makes these situations cost-effective candidates for working machine studying (ML) inference workloads. I’ll be discussing this matter intimately at AWS re:Invent 2025, the place I’ll share benchmarks and greatest practices for optimizing ML workloads on EC2 Mac situations.
To be taught extra about EC2 M4 and M4 Professional Mac situations, go to the Amazon EC2 Mac Cases web page or consult with the EC2 Mac documentation. You can begin utilizing these situations in the present day to modernize your Apple growth workflows on AWS.