by Jason Snell
AWS offers Mac mini hosting
In a surprise move, Amazon has jumped into the hosted Mac world, adding Mac minis to its EC2 service. As TechCrunch reports:
The target audience here — and the only one AWS is targeting for now — is developers who want cloud-based build and testing environments for their Mac and iOS apps. But it’s worth noting that with remote access, you get a fully-featured Mac mini in the cloud, and I’m sure developers will find all kinds of other use cases for this as well.
Amazon has a lot of advantages over smaller hosting companies, but of course, the smaller hosts who have specialized in Mac hosting for a while have advantages of their own. It’s still remarkable to see Amazon actually sticking Mac hardware in racks and renting it out to customers.
The current offering is i7 based 2018 vintage Mac minis. Amazon says M1 models will be available next year.