AWS are offering the first ever officially supported macOS virtualisation, I would call that a milestone. Given the costs, you would only use these instances for "approved" development work only. It is aimed at larger companies where maintaining a MacBook Mini build server is relatively expensive. Such companies will be using more than one instance of a MacBook mini to have a level of redundancy in case of a failure. If they are used in earnest, such instances would have to be replaced at least every year with old instance disposed off professionally (scrambling hard drive contents, etc). Yes the instances are expensive, but there is a definitely an use case for these.
Neither is it first. MacStadium have done this for years.
GitHub Actions, Semaphore CI, CircleCI, Bitrise, they have all done actual virtualisation of macOS for a number of years too. Yes it's a slightly more specialised problem domain, but nothing about this is correct.
Technically no, but the word has come to mean something different. Because even bare metal instances come under the same APIs, security, architecture and usage model as the other "real" VMs, the difference is very slim now. We can think of them as VMs of a specific size with a minimum billing time and get on with using them with our existing tooling.
> but the word has come to mean something different
No, it hasn't. If you're using "VM" to include bare metal, then you are using the wrong term for something. The definition of the word "virtualization" has not changed.
I think you’re using the terms incorrectly. This is “Hardware as a Service” not a “virtual machine.” Yes, AWS Nitro provides extensive management services for both, but they are fundamentally different things even if you access them in similar ways.
The new instance name is “mac1.metal” just like AWS’ other hardware as a service offerings:
If you are a startup, you can have your MacBook Mini in the office. As a larger organisation, you will need a dedicated server room for it limiting access to authorised staff members. You are likely going to need more than one, as you don't want your developers sitting around doing nothing if your MacBook Mini fails. You also need to allocate IT budget to maintain your devices and to replace them on a regular instance.
