Growth is good, and when development teams grow, often, they find themselves having to choose between performance and scalability factors related to their development process. Most often, iOS application development project start by consuming hosted service offerings for their build and test processes. Then, as growth happens, team size increases, the velocity of code commits increase significantly, the number of projects increase, and soon performance issues like long queue wait times and longer build and test times start to creep up.
In most scenarios, one can throw more resources at this problem to address the issue. However, in the macOS world, that’s not the case. While scalable and high-performing platforms like AWS, Google Cloud, Azure which are powered by virtualization exist for Linux and Windows, nothing similar exists for macOS. All existing approaches to virtualization of macOS suffer from a tradeoff between scalability and performance.
Veertu Anka hypervisor eliminates the need for the user to make this tradeoff. Anka Build, powered by Anka hypervisor, enables growing iOS development teams to very easily, setup and configure a scalable and high performing AWS like private cloud for iOS build and test.
There is a lot of skepticism around the performance of iOS simulator test jobs on virtualized infrastructure, especially as the test portfolio expands. Anka Build addresses this for its users with a combination of three variables. – The performance of Anka VM, Time to provision an on-demand VM and VMs in Anka registry with pre-boot iOS simulator.
Anka VMs run on top of Anka Hypervisor, which is a new lightweight virtualization technology that leverages the macOS Hypervisor.framework to run macOS VMs in the most resource efficient manner. Instead of directly requesting and managing macOS resources like CPU or memory for the VMs, Anka Hypervisor, through the macOS Hypervisor.framework, lets the operating system manage the VM resource needs in the same way it runs other applications. As a result, Anka VMs perform much faster and are more responsive. Anka VMs are also packaged with a para-virtual block and network drivers, to enable faster execution of build and test jobs.
Time to provision or the time it takes to have an environment ready for the iOS build and test job is a significant factor that impacts overall performance. Anka Build addresses this with ‘Instant Start’ feature. ‘Instant Start’ offers on-demand provisioned instances instantaneously (1-2 sec) to execute the iOS Ci jobs.
iOS simulator UI test job performance on dedicated or virtualized hardware is impacted by, the long boot time of iOS Simulator. With Anka Build, DevOps can address this problem by pre-booting the simulator in the VM for each device type and pushing the VM to Anka registry. Then, CI UI test jobs, through Anka controller can on-demand provision instances from these VMs and use the pre-booted iOS simulator at full throttle. Each test is run in a clean, sterilized environment with pre-booted simulator of a particular device type.
In our internal tests, we have recorded that iOS simulator UI tests performed with Anka Build and pre-booted simulator VMs take less time than when running on dedicated hardware.
iOS simulator test in Anka VM
iOS simulator test on dedicated hardware
