Mac instances on Amazon Web Services now support macOS Big Sur and Elastic File System

Zac Hall | Feb 24 2021 - 7:50 am PT

macOS Big Sur stable enough to upgrade your Mac?

Amazon had a surprising announcement back in December when it revealed support for Mac instances on AWS. macOS Mojave and Catalina were the only supported operating systems at launch, and now the latest OS for Mac is officially supported.

Here’s the announcement from AWS:

Starting today, customers can run macOS Big Sur (11.2.1) as Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) on EC2 Mac instances. macOS Big Sur is the current major macOS release from Apple, and introduces multiple new capabilities and performance improvements over prior macOS versions. macOS Big Sur will support running Xcode versions 12.5 and later, which will include additional SDKs for iOS 14.5, iPadOS 14.5, tvOS 14.5, watchOS 7.4, and macOS Big Sur 11.3. Customers can now also access Amazon EFS file systems from EC2 Mac instances running macOS Big Sur.

The new macOS Big Sur Amazon Machine Images operate from Amazon Web Services in these locations:

US East (North Virginia)
US East (Ohio)
US West (Oregon)
EU (Ireland)
Asia-Pacific (Singapore)

Amazon says macOS Big Sur Amazon Machine Images are backed by Amazon Elastic Block Store with support for tools including AWS Command Line Interface, Command Line Tools for Xcode, Amazon SSM Agent, and Homebrew.

EC2 Mac instances enable customers to run on-demand macOS workloads in the AWS cloud for the first time, extending the flexibility, scalability, and cost benefits of AWS to all Apple developers. With EC2 Mac instances, developers creating apps for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, Apple TV, and Safari can provision and access macOS environments within minutes, dynamically scale capacity as needed, and benefit from AWS’s pay-as-you-go pricing.

Finally, Amazon adds that its Elastic File System is fully compatible with Mac instances running macOS Big Sur on AWS.

You can also mount your Amazon EFS file systems on your instances using the macOS native NFS client version 4.0. To learn more about mounting Amazon EFS file systems on EC2 Mac instances, see the Amazon EFS documentation.
Amazon EFS provides a simple, serverless, set-and-forget elastic file system for use with AWS compute services. You can use Amazon EFS with your Amazon EC2 Mac instances to build, test, and publish your applications faster by sharing code repositories.