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Mac In The Cloud
AWS announced EC2 Mac instances — what does it mean for developers, testers and product engineers
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Earlier this week, AWS announced that their flagship compute service, EC2, will be offering Mac instances for macOS. People in the developer community have been waiting for this for quite a long time now.
Developers can now use homebrew package manager and use XCode for development on AWS. They can connect to the remote Mac EC2 instance using one of the following two ways —
Terminal
Just like you log into an Amazon Linux EC2 instance using your username/password combination or your SSH key, you can log into Mac using the same method. Once you log in, you’ll land on the same screen you’d land on if opening the Terminal app on your local Mac.
VNC
The other way, of course, is to access the Mac using the GUI. Mac is known for its refined GUI. It’s one of the reasons people find it so hard to move from Mac to any other operating system. The overall development experience on a Mac usually better than other OSes.
Here are the steps you have to follow to enable VNC on your new Mac in the cloud on AWS →
The backbone of this mammoth task by AWS is another project called AWS Nitro System which has a faster way to manage core resources. AWS has offered macOS in the form of Mac Mini computers stacked together using the aforementioned virtualization framework. Learn more about the Nitro Project here.
Developers, data analysts, data scientists, data engineers, and product engineers who use Mac on a daily basis will be happy to hear this news as they would be able to continue their important work on remote highly scalable machines (or array of machines).
I am not for one or the other. I love working on all operating systems. But someone somewhere has said —
Mac users swear by their Mac, PC users swear at their PC.
On your local Mac, disk space, memory and compute, all three can become a bottleneck. Not anymore!
