3x macOS Build Speed: How Orka is helping Lloyds Banking Group improve efficiency and scalability

Lloyds Banking Group has been helping its customers and communities for more than 300 years. The major UK-based financial services group provides a wide range of banking and financial services to its 28 million customers. Lloyds Banking Group’s mobile application is a crucial part of their business, with 20.9 million customers actively using their mobile apps.

The opportunity: From legacy infrastructure to automation

Lloyds Banking Group’s iOS development team was using 15 Mac minis running on-premises in their office to manage their build pipeline. The team knew that virtualization and automation could reduce the build failures, instability, and operational delays that happen with bare metal machines. When infrastructure issues occurred, they had to be resolved physically in the server room, taking skilled team members away from higher-value work.

In addition to reliability, the team also wanted to increase scalability. Expanding capacity with a CI solution running on legacy Macs required coordination across multiple teams and could take weeks to execute.

With approximately 100 daily builds driving app development and QA, there was a significant opportunity to increase speed and agility.

Enter Orka - The scalable, reliable, and efficient solution

Lloyds Banking Group chose MacStadium’s Orka as part of their CI solution, which allowed for automated, on-demand macOS virtualization and orchestration to help scale their CI pipeline. This enabled the team to replace physical machines with automated, scalable macOS environments in the cloud.

“Partnering with MacStadium and adopting Orka has helped us enhance our ability to scale our macOS infrastructure,” said Daniele Galluccio, Engineering Lead - Mobile Frameworks Lab / Digital Frameworks at Lloyds Banking Group. “Today, we can scale in a matter of days, enabling us to respond swiftly to business needs and market changes.”

Get to market faster with Orka

To keep pace with Apple’s evolving development ecosystem, the Lloyds Banking Group team wanted to move away from the unscalable nature of legacy Mac infrastructure. With the help of Orka, the team can now rapidly respond to platform updates, integrate new technologies, and maintain alignment with industry shifts in the Apple ecosystem. With full macOS VM control, they can instantly pivot and adapt to new trends before their competition.

“With the help of Orka, we now have full control over our macOS build environments,” said Galluccio. “This autonomy has helped to accelerate our ability to adopt new tools and update our technology stack, without relying on cross-functional dependencies.”

Faster macOS build speeds saved the team time and money

Orka has helped Lloyds Banking Group significantly improve build performance, developer productivity, and overall cost efficiency.

• Build times reduced by over 3x, from 90 minutes to 25 minutes
• Provisioning macOS VMs now takes 30 minutes, down from a full week
• Isolated, clean build environments have improved reliability
• Infrastructure-related costs have decreased, while virtually eliminating the need for manual interventions

The move to Orka also freed developers to focus on higher-value work, enabling faster app releases, improved reliability, and reduced time-to-market.

Conclusion

With the help of Orka, Lloyds Banking Group is modernising its iOS development workflow, gaining build speed, scalability, and reliability. The shift to a flexible, virtualized macOS environment has allowed development teams to innovate more and troubleshoot less.