We’re starting a new annual tradition here at Veertu with our A Year of Anka blog posts. We want our customers to know how the product has grown over the past year and think this is a great avenue to do so. Please enjoy and happy holidays from all of us at Veertu!
As 2024 comes to a close, we’re thrilled to reflect on an extraordinary year of innovation and growth for Anka Software. This post highlights how the Anka Core Virtualization Package, Anka Build Cloud, and CI Plugins and Integrations helped businesses and developers raise the bar for macOS virtualization and CI/CD workflows.
Anka Core Virtualization Package
The Anka Core Virtualization Package has grown significantly over the past few years and remains the strong foundation of Veertu’s macOS virtualization ecosystem, enabling developers and teams to create, manage, and run macOS virtual machines with container-like capabilities and in familiar ways to their existing Linux workflows. Designed specifically for macOS, the Core Virtualization Package has changed the way iOS and macOS development and testing workflows are handled by providing a consistent, reproducible, and high-performance environment.
By offering a lightweight and scalable approach to virtualization, the Core Package has become a trusted tool for teams looking to optimize resource utilization and reduce the complexities traditionally associated with macOS virtualization. It has become an invaluable asset for enterprises, educators, and developers alike, empowering them to deliver faster, iterate more effectively, and achieve better outcomes in their macOS and iOS projects.
Let’s go over some of the significant improvements for the 13 releases of Anka Virtualization for year 2024:
- Major networking speed and stability improvements for both Intel and Silicon/ARM showing equivalent speeds to the bare metal host.
- Added Anka Export and Import commands, allowing users to quickly export their VMs to an archive and move them, without networking, to other hosts for testing. [read more]
- Introduced anka-select allowing users to install and switch between multiple versions of Anka on the same host. [read more]
- Supported fixing the same MAC Address for multiple VMs to test software that requires a fixed MAC. [read more]
- Expanded the free Anka Develop license to allow running more than one VM on develop laptops.
- Further optimization for Anka running on AWS EC2 Mac, including full support for IMDSv2 metadata security.
- Anka Click Scripts continue to improve with improvements for text pattern targeting. [read more]
- Silicon/ARM VMs now support a real Apple Virtual Sound Device for those audio tests your team relies on.
- On Silicon/ARM, suspending a VM is now supported through the Anka GUI app.
- Full support for Nested Virtualization inside of Intel Mac VMs. This allows customers to run qemu, docker, etc, all inside of their VMs. [read more]
As you can see, we’re continuing to push what’s possible with macOS Virtualization and adding features that make our customers successful along the way. Our large customers serving thousands of customers a day across hundreds of macOS host machines and VMs benefited greatly from these improvements and we hope you will too.
The Anka Build Cloud
The Anka Build Cloud takes the power of Veertu’s virtualization ecosystem to new heights by providing a scalable, automated, and efficient solution for managing macOS workloads in CI/CD pipelines. Created for teams seeking to automate their macOS virtualization processes, the Build Cloud acts as the orchestration layer for dynamically provisioning and running Anka virtual machines across a cluster of Apple hardware.
Seamlessly integrated with the Core Virtualization Package, the Anka Build Cloud eliminates the operational complexity of macOS CI/CD workflows by streamlining the entire process—from VM provisioning to job execution and cleanup. It abstracts the heavy lifting from users, enabling faster pipelines, consistent builds, and robust resource management for teams of all sizes.
At a high level, we’ve focused this year on making troubleshooting easier for customers and our own team, as well as improving the interfaces used for automation, especially for our EC2 Mac users.
Let’s go over some of the significant improvements for the 6 releases of the Anka Build Cloud for year 2024:
- Ability to join your Nodes in “Drain Mode” and only allow them to accept jobs when you’re ready. [read more]
- Healthcheck endpoints for Kubernetes and other monitoring tools. [read more]
- Ability to search through the Templates listing in the Controller UI. [read more]
- Last pushed and pull timestamps for Templates and Tags, helping locate unused VM images you can safely delete. [read more]
- API endpoint for restarting VMs [read more] and obtaining the license expiration [read more] for each Node in the cluster.
These improvements, along with many bug fixes and other minor changes we didn’t list have allowed customers to integrate the Anka Build Cloud into their environments with relative ease.
CI Plugins, Integrations, and Tooling
Our customers vary greatly in their needs due to the diversity of CI/CD/Automation tools they use. We had several impactful shifts and releases for the tooling we provide to support them:
- We released a Gitlab Custom Executor that our customers can use instead of the older now EOL gitlab runner fork we provided with our executor built into it. This was a huge improvement for customers as they can now use the latest gitlab runner instead of waiting on us to update the old forked code.
- Another exciting release is Anklet beta, a generic service customers can use to build their own custom plugins that communicate with their CI tools and services to run VMs, send metrics, etc. The beta includes plugins for Github Actions and works by listening for Github Actions webhooks to know when to create and register an Anka VM with Github for a specific workflow job.
- For monitoring, we’ve updated our documentation with a guide for integrating Loki for Log Aggregation across the various services/tools in your Build Cloud. This is an alternative for Splunk.
Gratitude and Forward Momentum
2024 has been another year of success for us and our customers. I want to take a moment to sincerely thank our open source contributors. Many of our tools are open source and we welcome contributions. We’ve received more open source contributions this year than any other year! We’re honored that we can work together with some of the world’s top engineers to innovate and refine our tooling.
With Anka Core Virtualization Package and the Anka Build Cloud continuing to evolve, we’re excited to keep empowering developers and teams worldwide. Thank you for being part of this incredible journey, and stay tuned for what’s next in 2025!
We’d love to hear how Anka made a difference for your team in 2024. Share your story with us at [email protected] or on Slack.
If you’re interested in getting started with Anka in 2025, check out our documentation!
