Amazon Web Services Inc. today announced the general availability of Amazon EC2 M1 Mac instances, dedicated Mac mini computers attached through Thunderbolt to the AWS Nitro System, its computing virtualization platform.

The new instances allow the Mac mini to appear and behave like any other Amazon EC2 instance and enable developers to access machines built around the Apple-designed M1 System on Chip.

EC2 Mac instances were announced at AWS re:Invent in December, with the EC2 M1 Mac instances launched in preview. In connecting through Thunderbolt to Nitro, developers can now connect their Amazon Virtual Private Cloud to boot from Amazon Elastic Block Store volumes, use EBS snapshots and Amazon Machine Images, and link into security groups and other AWS services such as Amazon CloudWatch and AWS Systems Manager.

The release allows a Mac developer to re-architect apps not only to support Macs natively with Apple silicon but also to build and test apps and take advantage of all the benefits of AWS. Developers building for iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and Apple TV are also said to benefit from faster builds.

There is also a price incentive with the new offering. EC2 M1 Mac instances are claimed to deliver up to 60 percent better price performance over the x86-based EC2 Mac instances for iPhone and Mac app build workloads.

EC2 M1 Mac instances have evolved over the preview period with new features added. Agents for management and observability, such as Systems Manager and CloudWatch, are now pre-installed on all macOS AMIs, along with tools such as the AWS Command Line Interface and AWS SDKs. EC2 M1 Mac instances integrate with other AWS services, such as Amazon Elastic File System for file storage, AWS Auto Scaling and AWS Secrets Manager.

In a blog post announcing general availability, Sébastien Stormacq, principal development advocate at AWS, gave an example of how the service could be used.

“For example, I am using Secrets Manager to securely store my build secrets, such as the signing keys and certificates used to sign my binaries before distributing them on the App Store,” Stormacq explained. “From my laptop, I first make sure to export the certificate from the macOS keychain. I then upload my certificate to Secrets Manager. On the EC2 M1 Mac instance, to prepare my instance before the build phase, I download the certificate, decode it (it is base64-encoded), and store it in the EC2 M1 Mac instance keychain, where the codesign tool will find it during the build.”

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