New – Amazon EC2 M1 Mac Instances

Final 12 months, through the re:Invent 2021 convention, I wrote a weblog submit to announce the preview of EC2 M1 Mac cases. I do know lots of you requested entry to the preview, and we did our greatest however couldn’t fulfill all people. Nevertheless, the wait is over. I’ve the pleasure of asserting the overall availability of EC2 M1 Mac cases.

EC2 Mac cases are devoted Mac mini computer systems connected by Thunderbolt to the AWS Nitro System, which lets the Mac mini seem and behave like one other EC2 occasion. It connects to your Amazon Digital Non-public Cloud (Amazon VPC), boots from Amazon Elastic Block Retailer (EBS) volumes, and makes use of EBS snapshots, Amazon Machine Pictures (AMIs), safety teams and different AWS companies comparable to Amazon CloudWatch and AWS Methods Supervisor.

The provision of EC2 M1 Mac cases helps you to entry machines constructed across the Apple-designed M1 System on Chip (SoC). In case you are a Mac developer and re-architecting your apps to natively assist Macs with Apple silicon, you could now construct and check your apps and benefit from all the advantages of AWS. Builders constructing for iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Apple TV may also profit from sooner builds. EC2 M1 Mac cases ship as much as 60 % higher worth efficiency over the x86-based EC2 Mac cases for iPhone and Mac app construct workloads.

For instance, I examined the time it takes to scrub, construct, archive, and run the unit checks on a pattern undertaking I wrote. The brand new EC2 M1 Mac cases full this set of duties in 49 seconds on common. That is 47.eight % sooner than the identical set of duties operating on the earlier technology of EC2 Mac cases.

To see launch an EC2 M1 Mac occasion from the AWS Administration Console or the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), I invite you to learn my final weblog submit on the topic.

Throughout the six months of the preview, we collected your suggestions and fine-tuned the service to your wants.

We’ve added a brand new FAQ part to our documentation to get began with EC2 M1 Mac cases. Brokers for administration and observability, comparable to Methods Supervisor and CloudWatch, are pre-installed on all our macOS AMIs, together with instruments such because the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) and our AWS SDKs. EC2 M1 Mac cases combine with different AWS companies, comparable to Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) for file storage, AWS Auto Scaling, or AWS Secrets and techniques Supervisor.

For instance, I’m utilizing Secrets and techniques Supervisor to securely retailer my construct secrets and techniques, such because the signing keys and certificates used to signal my binaries earlier than to distribute them on the App Retailer. From my laptop computer, I first be certain to export the certificates from the macOS keychain. I then add my certificates to Secrets and techniques Supervisor with this command:

aws secretsmanager create-secret            
       --name apple-signing-dev-certificate 
       --secret-binary fileb://./secrets and techniques/apple_dev_seb.p12 

On the EC2 M1 Mac occasion, to arrange my occasion earlier than the construct section, I obtain the certificates, decode it (it’s base64-encoded), and retailer it within the EC2 M1 Mac occasion keychain, the place the codesign instrument will discover it through the construct.

# obtain the certificates from Secrets and techniques Supervisor
SIGNING_DEV_KEY=$($aws secretsmanager get-secret-value  
      --secret-id apple-signing-dev-certificate         
      --query SecretBinary --output textual content)
	  

# save the certificates as a file
echo $SIGNING_DEV_KEY | base64 -d > seb_dev_certificate.p12

# import the certificates within the keychain 
safety import seb_dev_certificate.p12 
                -P "my_cert_password"   
                -k my.dev.keychain      
                -T /usr/bin/safety -T /usr/bin/codesign -T /usr/bin/xcodebuild

# delete the certificates from disk
rm seb_dev_certificate.p12

There are a couple of extra configuration steps to get code signing work from the macOS command line. You’ll be able to try this presentation I made or my code repository for the small print.

We’re making ready a few occasions that will help you study extra about EC2 M1 Mac occasion use circumstances and configuration. First, we not too long ago had a web-based webinar to learn to benefit from EC2 Mac cases for iOS growth, content material is offered so that you can eat on-demand after a free registration step. Second, we’re making ready a one-day, in-person developer convention for later this 12 months. The convention agenda will probably be filled with technical content material and workshops. Keep tuned on social media to study extra about it.

Final and never least, however not associated to EC2 Mac cases, the Apple WWDC 2022 convention passed off final month, from June 6–eight, 2022, and the content material is offered on-line. This can be a nice event to study extra about growth for Apple techniques normally.

And now, go construct 😉

— seb