Virtualized iOS builds at Shopify

https://engineering.shopify.com/blogs/engineering/scaling-ios-ci-with-anka

by geertj • 8 years ago

22 8 8 years ago

engineering.shopify.com

saagarjha• 8 years ago

I wonder how much the hardware costed in total.

anshargal• 8 years ago

I wonder how much the software costed in total.

edf13• 8 years ago

It took us about four months to implement the new infrastructure on top of Anka with a small team

Quite a lot I expect.

tauntz• 8 years ago

My gut feeling guess based on "small team, 4 months" would be around $200k for the initial development + a single full time employee for the future for maintenance and improvements. Add opportunity costs on top for focusing on something that's not their core business.

(Assuming US salaries, benefits, taxes and any related costs such as office space, equipment etc.)

But I'm probably biased as I spent 4 years of my life building and running a company that built a cloud based CI service for iOS, so that others wouldn't have to..

je42• 8 years ago

most of them that I tried are not working well enough. i.e. lots of performance issues, blocker bugs when runnning builds and/or reading reports.

maxehmookau2• 8 years ago

Apple allowing MacOS server on major cloud providers would be a game changer. I don't really understand their reason for not allowing this.

danpalmer• 8 years ago

They are deviating from standard PC architecture quickly with the introduction of things like the T1/T2 chips. They will want to depend on these things at some point.

The only 2 use-cases I can see for virtualised macOS are remote development/test machines, to which their answer would be "buy a real, local, Mac", and for continuous integration, for which their answer is currently fuzzy, but their acquisition of BuddyBuild makes me think they are likely to launch some sort of CI for developers in the future.

maxehmookau2• 8 years ago

That would be good. At the moment, I can autoscale CI builders that run on Linux on EC2 with a moment's notice at cloud scale.

I don't like having to run, maintain, and rack physical Macs to do the same for iOS/MacOS projects. It's a pain.

I was unaware of the BuddyBuild acquisition! I hope that helps in the future.

Virtualized iOS builds at Shopify

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