Amazon EC2 Mac instances customers
"Bitrise’s vision is to empower every organization to drive innovation, improve the customer experience and generate business value across mobile apps. Partnering with AWS to offer a seamless, cloud-native mobile CI/CD solution on the AWS Marketplace helps bring the power of Bitrise to businesses across the globe. Customers can now run Bitrise CI builds within their AWS account, powered by Amazon EC2 Mac and Linux instances. Building, testing, and deploying iOS and Android apps has never been easier, especially for organizations with strict data sovereignty and geographical restrictions. Bitrise on AWS provides easy to implement and maintain instances with the latest Xcode and Android Studio environments as AMIs or a Mac Virtual Machine. With a focus on exceptional security, reliability and ease of use, Bitrise ensures customer codebase stays safe. The Bitrise Cloud Controller’s end-to-end automation is cost efficient and facilitates automated EC2 Mac scaling. Customers can support mobile dev teams by scaling up machine usage up or down as business needs change. Looking ahead, we anticipate expanding our integration with AWS, bringing more innovative solutions to mobile app developers and further streamlining their development processes."
Julia Fodor-Horvath, Tech Lead in Build Services, Bitrise
“Before EC2 Mac instances, physically procuring and managing our Mac build infrastructure was challenging, and our output was limited by the available physical machines. Now with EC2 Mac instances, we can scale our iOS build fleet, easily bake, roll back, and roll forward custom macOS environments with AMIs, and debug any build or test failures with fully reproducible macOS environments. We have also modernized our iOS development pipeline by integrating with multiple AWS services such as IAM roles and policies to provide least privilege access, Secrets Manager to centralize macOS authentication, AWS Lambda and Amazon SNS to create Auto Scaling groups, and CloudWatch to give us centralized monitoring. Today, 100% of our production builds are running on EC2 Mac instances - our builds are 18.4% faster and 80.5% more reliable - and our iOS developers love it!”
Oliver Koo, Senior Software Engineer, Pinterest
How Pinterest Modernized iOS Build Infrastructure with Amazon EC2 Mac Instances (40:34)
"Intuit is a mission-driven, global financial platform company. Its products - including TurboTax, QuickBooks, and Mint - are designed to empower more than 50 million consumer, small business and self-employed customers around the world to improve their financial lives. EC2 Mac instances, with their familiar EC2 interfaces and APIs, have enabled us to seamlessly migrate our existing iOS and macOS build-and-test pipelines to AWS, altogether improving developer productivity. We’re experiencing up to 30 percent better performance over our data center infrastructure, thanks to elastic capacity expansion, and a high availability setup leveraging multiple zones. We’re now running around 80 percent of our production builds on EC2 Mac instances, and are excited to see what the future holds for AWS innovation in this space."
Pratik Wadher, VP of Product Development, Intuit
Intuit and Amazon EC2 Mac Instances
Listen to Pratik Wadher, the VP of Product Development at Intuit, describe how and why Intuit is using Amazon EC2 Mac instances.
“Airbnb is a travel platform that connects millions of Hosts and guests around the world for unique stays and experiences. We use EC2 Mac instances to build both in-house apps and our iOS app. Previously, running our macOS workloads on premises required significant maintenance including setup, reboots, and time consuming updates of the operating system and Xcode build environment. After migrating to EC2 Mac instances, we are able to redeploy a build node rapidly using familiar APIs and tools, run multiple AMIs across our fleet with all of the necessary versions of macOS and Xcode, and programmatically generate new AMIs and launch new instances on them, resulting in increased agility, reliability, and repeatability of our build environment. Also, scaling the size of our Mac environments up or down can be done on-demand instead of waiting weeks, more effectively meeting our business requirements."
Graham Gilbert, Senior Tech Lead Manager
“Migration to EC2 Mac has enhanced the Webex collaboration experience by helping developers deliver performance solutions for Apple devices. This makes our build and test process faster and more efficient, resulting in a 300% increase in test execution, up to 20% increase in development speed.”
David Preble, Technical Leader, Webex by Cisco
“The Legends of Runeterra team was excited to take advantage of EC2 Mac instances to consolidate our entire build pipeline (Windows, Linux, and now macOS) on AWS. Our build pipeline currently supports ~100 builds per day, up to 3,000 builds per month, and our source control has over 270K commits to-date. Prior to migrating to EC2 Mac instances, our team had to spend time on managing on-premises Macs. Now, with EC2 Mac instances our build pipeline delivers a complete end-to-end cross-platform build process for Unity CI/CD in the AWS cloud. This has allowed our team of over one hundred talented engineers, artists, and designers to decrease development time and accelerate innovation for the games Riot players have come to know and love."
Guy Kisel, Staff Software Engineer, LoR, Riot Games
"Klarna is an AI-powered global payments network and shopping assistant. Previously, we used physical Mac minis to run iOS app tests on-premises but this created security risks and high maintenance costs. After migrating to EC2 Mac instances on AWS, we now save approximately $100,000 annually and can scale our Apple fleet size on demand with AWS Auto Scaling. With 230 developers making daily code changes, we now execute over 100,000 iOS app tests per day on EC2 Mac in a secure, private network with minimal operational maintenance."
Leslie Wittig Quintanilla, Lead Engineer at Developer Services, Klarna
“We have utilized Apple M1-based EC2 Mac instances and saw the benefits of AWS flexibility, scalability, and lower costs. When we upgraded all our build agents to Apple M2-based EC2 Mac instances, we further experienced a 10-15% build time reduction across all of our iOS build tasks, especially during the recent launch of math and music.”
Murtaza Javaid, Software Engineer at Duolingo
"Before updating to EC2 Mac instances, we didn't have immediate access or a reliable SLA for our on-premises Mac machines— it could take days to get an offline build agent investigated or more capacity added. Whenever we wanted to upgrade Xcode, we had to download and install it one machine at a time which took us hours. Additionally, access and security credentials had to be managed per on-premises machine. Now with EC2 Mac instances, I can spin up a new virtual machine in minutes, improve security by using EC2 Instance Profiles, and create, test, and roll-out a new Xcode AMI across all of our build agents 4x faster. To top it all off - EC2 Mac instances are more powerful than the on-premises build agents we used to have and the network interconnect is faster as well. These speed improvements enabled us to reduce our macOS fleet size by 50%."
Heath Borders, Senior Mobile Engineer, Twitch
“At The Pokémon Company International, a subsidiary of The Pokémon Company in Japan that manages the property outside of Asia, we migrated our entire client build farm and Unity CI/CD to EC2 Mac instances to consolidate our build pipeline, take advantage of build automation, leverage CI/CD tooling such as Jenkins and TeamCity, and speed up build times. With the on-demand EC2 Mac instances, we are able to more effectively scale and support automated testing of our products. After migrating our Unity CI/CD from a third-party provider to EC2 Mac, we were thrilled that our Unity builds are 400 percent faster.”
Carla Dreyer, Senior Manager of DevOps Engineering, The Pokémon Company International
“Our mobile development teams experienced long build times developing our DIRECTV Stream applications for iOS and tvOS devices with on-premises Mac build infrastructure. By migrating to Amazon EC2 Mac instances, our build times were reduced by over 70%, from 22 minutes to 6 minutes. The cumulative time savings are exponential given the number of builds we process through our CI/CD pipelines each day. Additionally, we also saw 30% increased performance with EC2 Mac instances compared to our physical machines, allowing us to consolidate and use 30% fewer instances. As an added bonus, we can now manage the instances remotely and benefit from additional time savings.”
Patrick Lopez, Director, Technology, DIRECTV Entertainment Services
“It used to take our Alexa SDK team an average of 20 days to procure and configure an Apple Mac mini. Now, with Amazon EC2 Mac instances, we can provision capacity for our end-to-end voice and non-voice tests in 15 minutes, and the engineering team couldn't be happier. Our build and test stability has increased by 90%, our test suite maintenance decreased by 30%, and we have secure network access thanks to the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). ”
Elango Karunamoorthy, Software Development Engineer, Alexa
“We rearchitected most of our on-premises applications and CI/CD workloads for the cloud. Adopting Amazon EC2 Mac instances improved resilience, increased developer productivity, and enabled easy integration with other AWS services, such as Amazon S3 and Amazon VPC. With the EC2 Mac instance migration, our entire development process is now in AWS, giving us access to fresh machines that reduced our Xcode updates from 40 minutes to as fast as 6 minutes and improved our build speeds up to 71%. Since our main development tools are also now secured and accessible in an Amazon VPC, we no longer host physical builders in our office, removing the need for data rooms and additional access solutions.”
Danny Zijlstra, SVP, Head of Digital Platform, DNB
“We were previously using a 3rd party service to integrate Mac computers into our CI/CD process that limited our customer service experience, delayed our responses, and provided no options for scaling our fleet. EC2 Mac instances allow us to scale up and down instances on-demand when needed, helping us significantly improve developer productivity. We now spend less time waiting for CI/CD jobs to complete and less time maintaining and updating instances with the latest software, which has helped increase our overall operations velocity by 35%.”
Shyam Kannapiran, Director, Software Development (OCE), Technology Solutions, IQVIA
“Heropa is a leading hands-on lab platform that is used to deliver virtual instructor-led and self-paced training. With Amazon EC2 Mac instances we are able to provide our customers frictionless web-based access to macOS environments in the same way as they have had with EC2 Windows and Linux. Our customers no longer have to ship fleets of MacBooks to training sites, and as a result are able to reduce class setup times from weeks to minutes, as well as scale globally and more effectively. Furthermore, the seamless integration of EC2 Mac instances into complex sales demo and POC environments allows our cybersecurity software customers to create a true reflection of their customers’ setup which previously wasn’t possible.”
Jason Kinsella, Director, Heropa
“CircleCI empowers developers to innovate faster by managing change by automating their software build, test, and deployment processes. The adoption of Amazon EC2 Mac instances has transformed CircleCI’s infrastructure, provided greater scalability and flexibility with on-demand access to macOS environments, and optimized performance of efficient resource allocation during peak periods. With the addition of M2 support, CircleCI’s customers benefit from even faster, more reliable macOS build pipelines that are up to 38% faster than M1. We’re excited to continue expanding our partnership with AWS to further enhance our offerings and drive innovation for our customers!”
Rob Zuber, Chief Technology Officer, CircleCI
“Jam City creates mobile games where having an efficient build process is vital to the success of our company. Previously, we had a game build process split between a third-party provider and on premises physical machines which did not allow us to be as agile as we would have wanted. With the migration to EC2 Mac instances, our build process for Unity CI/CD is now 100% in the AWS Cloud. Doing so reduced complexity, allowed us to scale our Mac fleet whenever we needed, and provided us full control over our builds across operating systems. Now, our developers can focus on what they love - creating more innovative games for our players.”
Nevin Vorfeld, Central Services Platform Manager, Jam City
"At NBC Universal (NBCU), our team manages web portals and streaming websites. We support many apps that we wanted to modernize, but couldn’t with prior available options. Now with EC2 Mac instances we were able to quickly initiate a proof-of-concept, conduct a production pilot, and seamlessly migrate our full fleet, including our iOS and tvOS builds, from a third-party provider to EC2 within 2 days, to modernize our DevOps and application development.”
Chiranjeevi Chakka, Director of Technology, NBCU
“We have been very happy using AWS services, so when AWS released Amazon EC2 Mac Instances, we realized we could use them for our build-and-test pipelines and immediately reached out to adopt them. Once we had the Amazon EC2 Mac Instances running, we migrated basically all our builds in about 2 weeks. The first comment we got from the development team was that this was the first time our Mac builds were faster than the ones for PC. Over the course of 1 year, we doubled the number of concurrent players and increased our player base by 39 percent; improving the game quickly wouldn’t have been possible without Amazon EC2 Mac Instances and on-demand scaling. It’s easy to see why it was a good decision.”
Martin Blomgren, Head of Operations, Star Stable Entertainment
"Flipboard is an award-winning app that curates news and information for millions of customers in a user-friendly magazine format. We recently started using Amazon EC2 instances for our iOS build machines for tasks such as daily betas, App Store builds and submissions, and UI testing. We were able to easily migrate from our previous solution to EC2 Mac instances in three days including software installation, VNC sessions, accounts created, and moving all of our Jenkins jobs. The setup has been very reliable, and we also enjoy the flexibility to use either command line or screen sharing. Build times have reduced from 20 minutes to 5 minutes. UI automation tests that used to take 3 hours now take less than 1 hour. Download speeds are amazing, and the VNC sessions are as smooth as butter. Needless to say, this project was a huge success and we are super happy with the finished results.”
Colin Caufield, Lead iOS Engineer, Flipboard
AWS Summit 2021: Flipboard and Amazon EC2 Mac instances (05:16)
During the May 2021 America's AWS Summit, Flipboard's lead iOS engineer talks about his team's experience migrating to Amazon EC2 instances.
“DeNA aims to entertain and to serve through our businesses, under our mission to delight people beyond their wildest dreams. DeNA's major business areas are in mobile games, sports, live streaming, healthcare, and automotive. SWET (SoftWare Engineer in Test) team is part of the DeNA Quality Control Department and offers automated test development and implementation support. We have been using on-prem Mac computers and Mac-aaS providers including MacStadium for our game distribution builds. The management and operation of physical Macs is expensive, and additionally, we found ourselves looking for on-demand access to Mac computers with richer features and capabilities. During our evaluation of EC2 Mac instances, we were delighted by a simple Jenkins CI/CD integration, ease of leveraging custom macOS images, and the ability to scale our capacity on-demand - allowing us to decrease build times and increase the number of concurrent builds we can support. We look forward to EC2 Mac instances helping us to improve our quality and productivity, so we can deliver on our vision to make testing fun, smart, and delightful for end-users.”
Hisashi Iguchi, CI/CD Engineer, SWET, Quality Control Department, DeNA
"Mobile Premier League (MPL) is an online gaming platform that offers 60+ exciting games, such as Fantasy Cricket, Match 3, Spider Solitaire, Bubble Shooter, Baseball Star, Bowling, 8 Ball Pool, and more. Our DevOps & Reliability Engineering team used to run all their builds with on-premises Macs and Jenkins integration. Hardware problems and sluggish manual builds consumed our iOS developers’ time, delaying both iOS app builds and testing cycles by QA Engineers. Following a private beta preview and EC2 Mac POC with Jenkins CI/CD integration, we migrated builds of all our games to EC2 Mac instances. Now, we are able run up to 3x more parallel build jobs with each parallel build running 5-10% faster than a single on-premises build, fully removing the previous iOS development and QA bottleneck we had. As a result of the overall app development modernization in the AWS cloud with EC2 Mac instances, we enjoy full iOS build automation, high availability, ease of access, and better build performance.“
Ashesh Nishant, Head Of Technology, MPL
“We were seeking an infrastructure capable of hyper-growth and scale so were thrilled when we heard that AWS is now offering macOS-based EC2 instances. We are delighted with the performance of our new, native-mobile, Visual AI-powered test cloud running on Amazon's EC2 Mac instances.”
Adam Carmi, CTO and co-founder, Applitools
“As a leading AAA game developer, Aspyr always seeks to bring the best gaming experiences to our players. We utilize the best tools available to accomplish that goal, and using AWS for all our game development infrastructure - from networking and security to OS images and storage elasticity - makes bringing our creations to life a breeze. With EC2 Mac instances, we can share game assets and other files in the cloud 30% faster than on premises, allowing our developers to build more frequently and enabling higher quality products for our customers. When players see an Aspyr game on an Apple device, they can be confident that we’re working with the best technology partners to provide the best gaming experience possible.”
Daniel Hagen, Director of IT, Aspyr
"Veertu Anka is an out-of-the-box ready solution for integrating macOS workloads into any system. With EC2 Mac instances and Veertu’s Anka virtualization platform, Reflect's end-to-end web testing platform and now executes automated web tests in Safari on real macOS instances. We rely exclusively on EC2 Mac instances and Anka virtual machines in order to include Safari in our newest product offering, Cross-Browser Testing. In just a few weeks, a single developer on our team used Anka to configure and deploy virtualized macOS machines running our end-to-end web tests automatically. We observed no additional latency, and now our customers' workloads complete 38% faster. We're very happy partnering with Anka to manage our tests on EC2 Mac instances."
Fitz Nowlan, Co-Founder, Reflect
“Before EC2 Mac instances, we had a server room full of Mac hardware that we had to manage. Anytime we needed to add more computing power, we had to work with internal IT to procure and setup new machines. Deploying updates to our build farm meant running playbooks on every single machine, occasionally requiring IT intervention when things went wrong. Now with EC2 Mac instances, we're able to fully manage our infrastructure without the need for a physical server room and deploy updates faster than ever. We’ve saved hours of developer time and resources that we can reinvest in product development to support better customer and merchant experiences.”
Zeke Pendexter, Release Engineer, Groupon
Partners
“Jamf is the standard for managing and securing Apple at work. We’re the only company in the world that provides a complete management and security solution for an Apple-first environment that is enterprise secure, consumer simple and protects personal privacy. The relationship between AWS and Jamf brings the power of AWS to our leading Apple Enterprise Management framework, providing real value at scale to organizations across many internal workgroups. Now through Jamf’s leading management and security solutions provided in partnership with AWS, organizations can now provide trusted access to EC2 Mac instances in the same manner they do physical Macs, which provides flexible resource allocation to organizations that rely on Mac for critical components of their business. We’re excited to continue to partner with AWS to push the envelope on what’s possible with cloud-first technologies centered around the Apple platform."
Dean Hager, CEO, Jamf
“As an Apple developer, you can now for the first time remotely access your Mac through the AWS Cloud with the performance and color fidelity needed to develop digital content. Going hybrid has never been this easy. Simply access a high-performance remote developer desktop by deploying Teradici CAS (Cloud Access Software) for macOS on your Amazon EC2 Mac instance or select it on AWS Marketplace. EC2 Mac instances with Teradici CAS enable you to work from anywhere, using the device and OS of your choice.”
Ziad Lammam, Global Head of Teradici Product Management, HP
“Buildkite is a CI/CD platform that helps teams create fast and reliable build pipelines. The introduction of Amazon EC2 Mac instances has allowed us to quickly integrate native macOS environment support into our open source CI/CD stacks for AWS. Our open source product, the Buildkite Elastic CI Stack for EC2 Mac, gives teams secure and scalable build pipelines for their mobile applications by taking advantage of Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling and AWS IAM permission support available with EC2 Mac. We are excited to provide built-in support for Amazon EC2 Mac instances, and the possibilities this creates for making iOS and macOS development faster and more streamlined for everyone.”
Tim Lucas, Founder and co-CEO, Buildkite
"Center of Internet Security (CIS) Hardened Images are built to CIS Benchmarks that include more than 100 configuration guidelines across 25+ vendor product families. With the addition of Apple macOS, CIS now offers image hardening for the three most popular operating systems within the AWS cloud. Apple developers needing to build applications for highly regulated industries can now simply select a CIS hardened macOS AMI on AWS Marketplace, spin up Amazon EC2 Mac instances, and have access to a secure development and production environment in the AWS cloud within minutes."
Curtis Dukes, CIS Executive Vice President and General Manager, Security Best Practices, CIS
"Anka, by Veertu, is a macOS type-2 virtualization platform that creates agile, ephemeral, infrastructure-as-code continuous integration (CI) environments for iOS and macOS development. Amazon EC2 Mac instances empower developers through scalable, secure, and performant macOS infrastructure. Anka, available through the AWS Marketplace, provisions short-lived, sandboxed, on-demand macOS virtual machines on top of EC2 Mac instances. Anka on EC2 Mac instances accelerates application development giving iOS and macOS developers and DevOps teams end-to-end build automation, instant elasticity, and code-based management."
Manisha Arora, Co-Founder, Veertu
"CloudBees shapes the way some of the most sophisticated businesses deliver software and innovation to their customers. We enable developers to focus on delivering great software, while providing management with powerful risk mitigation, compliance, and governance capabilities. EC2 Mac instances provides high-performance macOS-based instances at scale, improving the CI/CD experience for Apple developers, and bringing the reliability and security of AWS to iOS and macOS development workloads. We're excited to continue expanding our partnership with AWS to automate, manage, and optimize software development and delivery across hybrid and multi-cloud environments."
Jose Pena, Global VP Channels, CloudBees