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Mobile developers build huge mac mini rack farms because they need to virtualize osx on top of Apple hardware for CI/CD/testing/store releases (or they used to

by swozey 7y ago

Mobile developers build huge mac mini rack farms because they need to virtualize osx on top of Apple hardware for CI/CD/testing/store releases (or they used to back when I last worked in mobile dev). That's the bulk of where I've seen MacOS used to control and provision minis (usually with plenty of ansible/chef/etc as well).

gowld 7y ago
Why would a mobile (iOS) dev need to virtualize OS X?
- saagarjha 7y ago
  To run Xcode.
- swozey 7y ago
  10+ devs running integration tests/etc that require different xcode targets, branches, etc. I haven't done this in years but it was a pretty basic mac mini farm 8+ years ago when I did do it with macos + ansible. I really doubt it's changed much (albeit 3rd parties like testflight/etc might be better integrated nowadays). It's a huge reason Macstadium, etc exists where you can just rent mini farms.
  - applecrazy 7y ago
    fwiw, TestFlight got absorbed into Apple through an acquisition. so they’re first party now.
Eikon 7y ago
Related: https://www.macstadium.com/ https://www.macstadium.com/