Amazon is bringing macOS to the cloud so developers can build Apple apps without dedicated hardware

App developers working for Apple devices can now get access to macOS as Amazon will bring the operating system on its cloud service for the first time. The development was informed by Amazons’ cloud unit Amazon Web Services.

Amazon that has previously offered Elastic Computer Cloud (EC2) Mac instances to other OS like Linux and Windows will now support developers for Apple devices like Apple TV, iPad, iPhone, Apple watch and Safari, the cloud unit said. The EC2 OS Mac instances run on Mac Mini laptops.

For the cloud services, Amazon Web Services will use the version used by Mac mini devices with 8th generation 3.2 GHz Core i7 processors that power the thinnest and lightest laptops.

David Brown, vice president of EC2 at AWS said that with this development, app developers can get access to macOS and focus on creating ‘groundbreaking’ apps for Apple’s platforms without procuring and managing its infrastructure. Amazon Web Services also mentioned that giving cloud support for Apple products with the new M1 chip is also in the pipeline and the launch will happen in 2021.

A big server outage was reported with AWS a few weeks ago affecting a large portion of the internet. Several apps and services like Acorns, Autodesk, Flickr, Glassdoor, Coinbase posted on Twitter that they were experiencing problems with the AWS services. Kinesis, a part of cloud offering, processes and analyses real-time data.

Apple users have also experienced issues while accessing iCloud services which includes iCloud Drive, Calendar, Photos, Contacts, Keychain, Find My and others early in November. Apple later confirmed that 14 iCloud services were affected by an outage. All services are now back online.