
Virtualized iOS builds at Shopify - geertj
https://engineering.shopify.com/blogs/engineering/scaling-ios-ci-with-anka
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maxehmookau
Apple allowing MacOS server on major cloud providers would be a game changer.
I don't really understand their reason for not allowing this.

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danpalmer
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.

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maxehmookau
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.

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anshargal
I wonder how much the software costed in total.

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tauntz
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..

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je42
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.

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saagarjha
I wonder how much the hardware costed in total.

