It has been several years since we made our first side by side comparison between Anka and Orka. A lot has changed, and we believe it’s important to make sure the information out there is accurate. We’ll be specifically addressing a newer Macstadium’s 2024 blog post about Anka as it contains a lot of incorrect information.
Kubernetes
Let’s start with “K8s native” support: The Anka Build Cloud Controller and Registry is agnostic and can flexibly deploy and scale no matter if you want to deploy it on Kubernetes, AWS EC2 and ECS, or on-prem infrastructure. The Controller, similarly to Kubernetes, then intelligently manages VMs through various CI/CD plugins, integrations, and API. We also provide a helm chart.
Ease of use
Anka’s Ease of use is mentioned as a “Proprietary system”. However, it’s not clear how exactly these two are related. Our CLI and Plugins have been copied over the years by many other tools and we take this as a compliment. Our CI plugins and integrations are also open source and available on our github.
The Anka image format does a great job at optimizing disk space usage and transfer times, allowing users to quickly move their VM images around hosts using the Registry or Anka’s export/import. It’s important to clarify that changes to any VM image (we call them templates) does not impact any “diffs” you created from it. They remain independent and you can even delete the base/source VM image without impacting others you created from it. The speed at which the VM images are transferred onto a host machine in order for them to be able to run VMs is entirely dependent on network speed, disk IO, and whether the destination has many of the layers already.
Performance, Scalability, and Reliability
Performance, Scalability, and Reliability is next on the list and a very important one to get right. Claims of “Performance degrades at scale” are baseless. There are several well-known public CI providers and game studios that run hundreds of nodes with on-prem hardware or even by scaling AWS EC2 Mac instances to meet their demand at scale. You can also scale + load balance your Controller and Registry ensuring that there is High Availability, regardless of where it’s hosted and across regions.
Vendor Maturity, Security, and Support
Finally, Vendor Maturity, Security, and Support! This one is important to us as it’s an area where Veertu and Anka really beat the competition. We offer support by email and community Slack, where you get access to our entire team whenever you need us. Our customers love how they can call us any time they need us and we’ll get into the weeds with them.
Veertu has been successfully building enterprise grade macOS virtualization technology since 2016, building the industry first virtualization for Intel MacOS with unique features like nested virtualization, GPU/Metal, and advanced networking. We now support ARM/Silicon with advanced features, becoming the first to automate the entire macOS setup process with Anka Click scripts so you can fully automate VM creation for new versions of macOS. Our strong belief in innovation and that we will continue to invest to build more innovative features in this space to help users with macOS or iOS CI on Mac hardware. Learn more about our technology at https://docs.veertu.com/anka/
