Nutpipe now uses Apple Silicon M1 machines for fast iOS builds
We are proud to announce that Nutpipe: mobile DevOps CI/CD platform now performs super-fast iOS builds leveraging the power of Apple Silicon M1 chips.
Since the beginning, we have used virtualized Mac machines with Intel Core i7 and loads of RAM.
⚔️ Apple Silicon over Intel
On Intel processors, the speed was bearable for daily/nightly builds of our clients, but we saw a huge time difference when they run the same builds locally on M1 laptops. We also saw the increased amount of builds before major releases of clients’ mobile applications sometimes causing longer waiting times for all the builds to finish.
The problem with Apple Silicon chips is — they are new and no existing virtualization tool supports the Mac-in-Mac setup. There is also too little information on the internet on the topic.
So we have rolled our sleeves up and started researching Apple Virtualization Framework, doing proof of concepts and testing. It took a lot of effort, but the results are putting us in a competitive mode and even ahead of most of the competition.
🚀 Fast disposable VMs
All the builds run in a VM that is in a matter of seconds freshly prepared just for your build and that is immediately disposed of right after the build is done. Therefore providing the required security and repeatability that our clients demand.
⚙️ Native XCode support
There are many projects out there that depend on different versions of XCode etc. Therefore during a build configuration you can choose which version of XCode you would like to have and we will spin the right VM for you with right XCode version available for your build.
☁️ Custom VM hypervisor — all the capacity you need
We went even further than having only VMs and built a cloud-like system — hypervisor — so now we are able to spin M1 based VMs based on the demand of our customers and increase our overall build capacity in a matter of hours to support the peak and unexpected demands.
Some numbers
So how much faster did we really get? For the test, we took an average React Native application and configured three simple steps to get the build:
yarn installpod installbuild
Then we prepared two Mac VMs:
- Intel Core i7, 4 virtualized cores, 4GB RAM
- Apple Silicon, 4 virtualized cores, 4GB RAM
Running the build on an Intel processor without cached resources we got an average of up to 25 minutes per build.
Running the same build on Apple Silicon we are getting up to 10 minutes per build. And that number can be further decreased by using more resources or caching 🔥.
Try it
As of now, all iOS builds on Nutpipe platform are leveraging fast and disposable Apple Silicon VMs. Feel free to try it for yourself on nutpipe.com or book a Demo showcase with us.
