Introduction
This financial technology company provides its customers with digital financial services, offering banking, credit, and payment products. They have millions of customers across the nation using their mobile app.
With more than 20 employees in QA automation and 130 involved in front-end engineering, the team is on a weekly release schedule based off of Apple’s app review cycle.
Static bare metal machines weren’t enough
The team originally started with MacStadium Mac bare metal runners. They went through the typical process of getting new OSs up and running: Getting the right OS, Xcode and simulator versions, and support files. Once the machine was registered as a shell runner, it then could run jobs. While this was the process they were used to, it had its obvious pain points, such as the effort to keep each environment up to date and the ongoing maintenance required. While bare metal Macs are a step above self-hosting, the team at this financial technology company wanted something better to streamline their app development process.
“The biggest thing for me was maintaining a consistent environment,” said the Automation Engineer at the company. “Being more involved on the automated test side, you want tests to be consistent and stable, so they consistently test the things you need them to.”
Before Orka Cluster, developers at this financial technology company would write tests based on the current state of the environment. For example, if someone updated a machine and saw a test failed due to a condition in the runner, they would fix the test, commit the change, and push it live. Later, if someone else made another change to the runner, the test would be outdated again, requiring further updates.
This caused a bunch of diverging paths, resulting in an inefficient process for managing environments on the bare metal machines. The team came to the conclusion that it was time to upgrade to a better solution for automating stable tests.
From instability to reliability with Orka Cluster
Realizing bare metal Macs by themselves were not sustainable for the QA automation and development teams, they turned to Orka Cluster for streamlined macOS virtualization + orchestration.
Using virtual machines (VMs) compared to static runners allowed the financial technology company to have a standard environment they can trust and rely on to support their growing mobile app development. The team always knows it’s in the state they need it to be, and that knowledge is priceless.
Along with increased stability, the amount of time the team saves is invaluable. Switching to different OSs caused bottlenecks, leading to unreliable and slow processes.
“We wasted a lot of time trying to figure out what was changed if something was updated in the environment,” said the Automation Engineer. “If you wanted to go to a previous OS, it was pretty difficult and disruptive. But now with Orka, we just deploy another image and we’re instantly there.”
Spend more time developing, less time managing your environment
Having peace of mind knowing your environment is ready to go with the latest Apple OS saves their team time and headaches. The team at the financial technology company saves 2-3 hours per week streamlining macOS virtualization with Orka Cluster.
Where they would normally take a considerable amount of time every week tweaking and updating their environment, they now have more time to dedicate to creating faster releases.
“We spend a lot less time configuring the environment and a lot more time doing the stuff we actually want to spend time on, like developing, testing, and releasing,” said the Automation Engineer.
Conclusion
Orka Cluster continues to improve this financial technology company’s app development process by enabling their team to focus on what matters most: building, testing, and releasing. By replacing static bare metal machines with Orka Cluster’s macOS virtualization and orchestration, they gained a reliable, standardized environment that eliminated bottlenecks and saved multiple dev hours every week.
Orka Cluster allows their team to deliver exceptional service to customers with on-demand, secure macOS cloud environments.
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Top Benefits:
✔ Standardized and reliable development environments
✔ More time dedicated to creating faster releases (2-3 hours/week)
✔ Drastically decreased bottlenecks by having easy access to the latest Apple OS
“We wasted a lot of time trying to figure out what was changed if something was updated in the environment. If you wanted to go to a previous OS, it was pretty difficult and disruptive. But now with Orka, we just deploy another image and we’re instantly there.”
Automation Engineer at the company
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