To better understand if switching to bare metal could help us shorten our build times and improve the performance and stability of our continuous integration system, we decided to run some benchmarks.
We didn’t want to completely lose the benefits of virtual machines, but we didn’t want to give up on our performance either.
The vision of this new product is the following: “Bare Metal Macs should be controllable and manageable like traditional virtual machines”. In January 2019, we noticed that Flow added a mention of a new bare metal solution that they were working on to their website. By talking with other teams in the industry, we noticed that more and more teams were moving to a bare metal solution, which sparked our interest. We slowly started to notice a steady increase in our build times and decrease in stability of our build machines as our codebases grew. We use the macOS cloud provider, Flow Swiss, and have developed a good relationship with the team following years of partnership. Luckily, we don’t host the machines ourselves, but let experts do it for us. Multiple VMs usually run on the same machine and they also share a storage area network (SAN).
This was really convenient since cloning the state from one machine to another was completely automated, i.e. Up until 2019, we ran all our continuous integration builds for iOS apps on macOS virtual machines (on both 2014 Mac Pros and 2014 Mac Minis). In the last few months, this allowed us to shorten the feedback loop of the pre-merge verification checks for our iOS applications by up to 75%. In this post, I would like to explain how we are specifically improving the continuous integration experience by upgrading the macOS machines that we use to run builds. We are constantly trying to reduce flakiness and make builds as fast as possible to prevent the slow-down of daily development and releases. Who doesn’t love a continuous integration system that is stable, fast, reliable and feels transparent to its users? One of the missions of the Client Platform tribe at Spotify is to improve the continuous integration and delivery experience of our mobile apps. Discover how we shortened the feedback loop of pre-merge verification checks for our iOS applications by up to 75%.
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