DEVOPSdigest

MacStadium unveiled Orka® 3.0, the most advanced version of its proprietary technology, Orka Platform.

MacStadium will be showcasing Orka 3.0 at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America from Nov. 7-9. To learn more about MacStadium and Orka 3.0, visit them at Booth J11 during the conference.

Powered by MacStadium, Orka (Orchestration with Kubernetes on Apple) is the only virtualization layer available for Mac build infrastructure based on Open Container Initiative (OCI) and Kubernetes technologies.

According to Gartner, a majority of software engineering leaders reported that a high-quality developer experience is critical to their organization’s C-Suite. With heavy workloads and the ever-changing dynamics of managing a cloud environment, development teams are under tremendous pressure to deploy apps faster and with greater security. Much of their time is often wasted on manual, arduous tasks when it can be spent doing what they do best: building great apps.

“After speaking to customers and listening to their feedback, we made it our mission to update our proprietary Orka Platform to meet the current needs of developers using our solutions every day,” said Chris Chapman, MacStadium's CTO. “Orka 3.0 aims to improve the developer experience by enabling OCI and Kubernetes-native technology, putting security first, and improving the container startup time.”

“With the Orka Platform, Thumbtack now has a virtualization platform that will support future Apple OS upgrades,” said Thumbtack iOS software engineer Scott Southerland. A lead iOS engineer at Glovo said, “MacStadium has helped us increase the throughput of our engineers and enabled us to scale faster. It has also given us much more control over our resources.”

The Orka Platform enables macOS orchestration and lifecycle management in a cloud environment by leveraging Kubernetes. It is designed to deliver high-performance virtual macOS environments in seconds for everything from simple Xcode builds to fully integrated, complex, automated CI/CD pipelines. Some of the key features that customers can expect with version 3.0 include:

- Kubernetes-native: Many development teams leverage Kubernetes to manage scalable cloud environments, but traditional Mac limitations often force iOS and macOS developers to operate outside cloud-native environments and in silos. MacStadium solved that problem by releasing a new Kubernetes-native version of Orka, making Mac DevOps more automated and scalable than ever. Orka users and administrators can scale, manage and access their large clusters of macOS hosts by leveraging native Kubernetes capabilities and integrations.

- Developer productivity: Teams can spend less time on repetitive or time-consuming tasks and more time building great apps. With Orka 3.0, developers can automate workflows with its new automation-friendly command-line interface, updated API and thin-provisioned OCI images to save critical hours.

- Security without roadblocks: Orka is a scalable, cloud-based Mac DevOps solution that allows developers to work more efficiently and meet their organization’s high security standards. As development teams undergo constant change due to contractors and team growth, managing accounts for everyone across multiple places becomes difficult. Orka 3.0 allows customers to seamlessly manage user access with the SSO capability to ensure the right people have secure admittance to the right cloud environments.