The Valuable Role of Virtualization in the Apple Enterprise
Learn how Mac virtualization revolutionizes Apple DevOps for seamless enterprise software development.
Dive into the evolving landscape of Apple enterprise development with Chris Chapman of MacStadium. Uncover the critical role of virtualization in enhancing Mac DevOps capabilities and staying ahead in the dynamic tech realm.
The enterprise adoption of Apple devices continues to expand dramatically. Three out of four large enterprises report an increase in their use of Apple devices in the past year, and 57% report that Apple device use is growing faster than other options.
Increased performance benefits brought on by Apple Silicon have now placed macOS at the center of enterprise software development. For Mac development professionals, this is where the power of virtualization can become critical for development teams and can transform the future of Mac DevOps.
Empowering Developers with More Opportunity
Virtualization technology allows developers to experiment with application testing and deployment in a controlled environment. By creating virtual instances of their application environment (including different OSs, tools, and libraries), developers can accelerate their ability to test their applications across a pool of consistent hardware that allows for various configurations. This flexibility is crucial in the Mac ecosystem, where developers must ensure compatibility across different Apple devices and OS versions. Virtualization allows them to do so without requiring extensive physical hardware management, automation, and repurposing, significantly reducing costs and resources.
By virtualizing Mac environments, developers can leverage standardized development and testing environments that accurately mirror production. This consistency is invaluable, as it reduces the likelihood of discrepancies between the development, testing, and deployment phases. As a result, this minimizes the chances of unexpected issues arising when the software is deployed to end-users, increases the delivery velocity, and ensures a smoother user experience.
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Uncertainty Paves The Way For Virtualization Alternatives
Most users rely on traditional virtualization providers to deliver virtualized Mac compute. However, recent developments over the past few years are changing the landscape of virtualization choices.
Apple announced the new Apple Silicon m1 architecture in November 2020. As a result, VMWare also announced that it would discontinue the support of Mac, leaving enterprise Mac-centric software teams who ran their business on the EXSi platform scrambling to find better ways to continue supporting their development practices.
There are solutions for build-as-a-service intended to abstract infrastructure from the development process. They make it easier to start for individuals and small-scale workloads but limit your control of what you build on, where it is built, and how it performs. These solutions are great for focusing on basic builds but lead to challenges as teams or development tasks evolve, leading to a lack of control, flexibility, and autonomy. Ultimately, these choices are directly viable for replacing an existing virtualized environment or infrastructure without change.
The good news is that developers, especially those in the Apple enterprise, have a more seamless and cost-effective replacement option. DevOps teams that work exclusively with Mac servers can find the top virtualization replacement for Mac build infrastructures among private cloud providers. This type of virtualization, which enables macOS orchestration in a cloud environment via Kubernetes on genuine Apple hardware, is a solution that simply did not exist in the Apple ecosystem before.
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Unlocking The Future of Development
One of the major differences among virtualization software for Mac infrastructures is its cloud-focused design. This means it brings industry-leading infrastructure management capabilities to Mac in the data center. It also allows customers to rapidly instantiate and scale versions of their Mac environments in a very automated and agile fashion compared to more time-consuming, complex, and manually automated processes required with typical bare-metal infrastructures. This is a valuable capability when modernizing the Mac development lifecycle. Mac virtualization also provides integrations that connect with the most popular CI/CD management tools and DevOps platforms.
Developers continuously search for software built for increased performance and usability. Some of the key benefits that DevOps teams are prioritizing include enhanced security integration, allowing customers to seamlessly manage user access with integrated SSO to ensure a business can more easily manage rights and access to the cloud environment. With security at the forefront, managing various workloads highlights the need for robust tooling and specialized knowledge such as Kubernetes-native technology.
Kubernetes-native supports the developer experience with Mac instances by providing performance and integration features like native Kubernetes resource scheduling and command line tooling. Additionally, OCI image support improves performance. It opens the platform to integration with registries like ECR and GitHub, making adopting Mac DevOps more manageable, automated, and scalable. Leveraging APIs for integrations and scriptable command lines are the types of interaction experiences that developers know and expect. To that end, virtualization alternatives are enabling Mac OS orchestration that is easy to adopt, expand, and customize to meet specific tooling needs and pipelines of users’ build stack.
In essence, Mac virtualization can better enable a flexible, efficient, and collaborative platform that empowers developers to do what they do best at an enterprise-grade, highly scalable level.
As Apple’s proliferation into the enterprise continues to increase, developers who have the tools to adapt to Apple’s fast-paced release cycles and embrace DevOps practices will have a significant competitive advantage as they navigate the challenges and opportunities.
How can virtualization redefine your Mac DevOps strategy? Let us know on Facebook, X, and LinkedIn. We’d love to hear from you!
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