How to run Mac OS on AWS EC2 instances

I am sure lot of people were in the same boat as I was, hoping that one fine day we would be able to provision macOS in the cloud.

In re:Invent 2020, AWS announced support for EC2 Mac instances that enable customers to run on-demand macOS workloads in the cloud for the first time, extending the flexibility, scalability, and cost benefits of AWS to all Apple developers.

In this article, I plan to walk through step by step instructions on how to configure EC2 based Mac instance and how to log into it.

Amazon EC2 Mac instances are built on Apple Mac mini computers, featuring 8th Generation 3.2GHz (4.6GHz turbo) Intel Core i7 processors with 6 physical/12 logical cores, and 32GiB of Memory. EC2 Mac instances are provisioned in dedicated instances

Step 1:

Allocate a dedicated host of type mac1.metal. I had trouble creating from console and hence created using command line

$ aws ec2 allocate-hosts — instance-type mac1.metal \ — availability-zone us-east-1c — auto-placement on \ — quantity 1 — region us-east-1

Try different availability zones if you have issues with capacity. I had errors when I tried allocating a host in us-east-1a. I was successful in getting one instance spun up in us-east-1c.

Step 2:

Launch an EC2 instance from console or CLI. Choose one of macOS Catalina 10.15.7 or macOS Mojave 10.14.6 as an AMI and the instance type as…