DevOps for Apple: Insights with MacStadium’s Chris Chapman

Hey guys, thanks with Throw, we're here with Chris Chapman, who's CTO for MacStadium, and we're talking about well Max and DevOps because, well, it may be a little bit different than we think about it elsewhere, but we still need to figure out how to accelerate the development of these applications. Chris, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me.

It's good to be here. Yeah, Mac is different and uh, we've been doing it a long time, so excited to talk to you about it. So what does making applications in the land of Apple different and where do you see people adopting DevOps?

Because, you know, I mean, when I think about Apple, I think about all the different frameworks, but I'm not sure how any of that stuff actually gets deployed. Yeah, so, you know, kind of the biggest thing from an Apple ecosystem perspective is they need applications compiled on Apple genuine hardware to be deployed in their ecosystem, which means somewhere along your development lifecycle, you're using a Mac, whether that's for your ID that you start with, or whether that's for the Deploy machine that actually builds it and sends it up to the app store for approval. So it means you're gonna have to deal with Apple in your, your supply chain.

Um, and that's where, when you talk about true enterprise development, it can get pretty complicated because it's a sort of a individual desktop view of the world. And from a sophistication perspective, Apple's not the first choice. People choose to use their cloud scalable DevOps practices.

So it gets tricky pretty fast when you scale. So are there Apple specialists in, in the DevOps ecosystem? Is there a new class of people who are kinda adept at figuring out how to apply best practices to Apple?

Yeah, I mean, I think in fairness to the ecosystem, people have caught up pretty fast. Uh, apple also released an Xcode cloud, which sort of introduced ci cd principles to people who use Xcode. Um, but past that beyond, uh, sort of CI as a service clouds where it's just sort of a, you know, a, a bit rise or a GitHub actions or something where you can kind of go and do your dev work and there might be something on the backend that can help you out with that.

There's not a lot of expertise or skill in that area. It, it, it really is sort of a, a purple squirrel when it comes to infrastructure and development. So MacStadium has been around for, for 13 years plus, and, and that's kind of been our sweet spot.

'cause you know, hosting Apple is an interesting thing in and of itself in the primary use case is application build and development, or at least historically now in the new world, it's rapidly changing into other things with AI and all of that. But, uh, build and development has been the sweet spot. For folks that don't know who MacStadium is, where do you fit in the DevOps ecosystem?

So we're, we're a cloud provider, uh, akin to an Amazon or anyone else. Uh, we have about 30,000 max globally. Um, and where we fit is private, secure, dedicated cloud.

So that can be physical or we have a flagship product we call orca. And that's really where we made a big splash, uh, no pun intended, but in the sort of ecosystem there because it is the unification of Kubernetes, which is a more traditional DevOps and data center software management tool, uh, with Apple. So we sort of figured if we could bring Apple into DevOps practices and tooling, it would make DevOps easier for Apple.

So Oracle of virtualizes and Orchestrates and Containerizes and does all the Kubernetes type things. So what it really does for the Apple developers lets 'em get a tool like GitHub actions or Jenkins or anything they're used, used to and drive it with a development tool. And also lets a DevOps engineer use the Kubernetes that they know and love to actually control this Apple hardware that's been normally a under the desk in the IT club, that kind of asset, that's been a secondary concern for true operations people.

So how many of these applications are completely running in the cloud or are they more likely to be hybrid where there's a piece running on a client somewhere but they're invoking some sort of services in the cloud? Um, yeah, that's a great question. Typically, apple has been about Apple platform, so mobile, you know, your iPhone, your iPad, the, uh, desktop.

So once the build happens, they're often deployed out from the app store and end up on end user compute. Uh, on that said, there are databases, there are, uh, application updates that take place on the backend. We see in the Mac ecosystem that those can often be separated from the Apple hardware, so they don't necessarily run Apple hardware in the cloud side for the backend.

They might, they might use an AWS database or they might use some other cloud provider there, but the application front end or the application on device is, uh, an Apple centric application. There are use cases where that changes, um, and those typically range from things that are very specific to Apple. So like image processing and, uh, graphics capability and things that are very Apple centric.

We do see backend systems that also run in the cloud with those. Um, when you think about that, I mean we, in the, I guess I don't want to call it the, the mainstream DevOps community, but there's a lot of conversations about platform engineering these days. Is that a concept that can get applied to the way we build and deploy Mac applications?

Oh, absolutely. And again, that was sort of the purpose fit goal of Orca was Apple should, you should be able to build different in the way they made it from a positive perspective, meaning the best applications in the world with the coolest software, but you shouldn't have to build different from a DevOps perspective. So again, meshing Apple technology into mainstream DevOps tooling like Kubernetes, like, you know, mainstream hyperscale clouds, um, was the goal all along because you want your DevOps practitioners, your DevOps engineers, um, those guys to be able to control Apple as efficiently and effectively and securely as they do anything else, but still give the Apple developer the flexibility to use the cool parts of Apple that they like that are very different from Linux and Windows.

Of course, you can walk down the street these days without somebody leaping out to tell you about their great new AI thing, but how might AI get applied to, uh, software engineering in the context of an Apple environment? Yeah, it is a great question, and you are right. It is the light geist these days of course, but, um, uh, we, we actually see a really interesting momentum shift because there is all things AI from the, you know, Nvidia and from OpenAI and from these giant clouds, but there's, there's still the problem of what are you going to do with AI and how are you gonna run it?

There's still a growing concern about power efficiency and scale and accessibility of resources to even generate the workload that AI is creating. Um, we've actually partnered, uh, with some Apple centric folks. Uh, web AI is the name of this company, um, and we're working with them in Apple that, that are building AI specific to Apple Resources, which is kind of interesting because it's high power, low cost, very private, very secure.

So it's a little bit of the antithesis of the hyper scaled AI that you're hearing about on all the news feeds, but we're finding that it's creating a really interesting use case for the practical business specific. Like your company owns its own AI to do its own thing, use case, and all the benefits of low power. And so, you know, somewhat commoditized hardware that you can get anywhere very easily, but has some of the best AI engine and circuitry built into it in the world.

So it's an, it's an interesting, it's an interesting evolution for Apple. Like I said, it's kind of starting to drag us well outside of DevOps and CI/CD into, honestly, apple is a mainline platform. 'cause now the ai, the database, the business rules, the processing that can all happen on Apple based resources.

So it's pivoting us into more of a Mac ops sort of worldview because now you need to have not just DevOps practices, but overall system operational practices for Apple hardware and Apple Software, and how do you do it like Windows does and how do you do it like Linux does. Um, one of the things that I think people look at this and they kind of like the idea of it, but there's a lot of moving parts and they get overwhelmed. So what's your best advice to folks about, well, where to get started with introducing DevOps to Apple software development?

Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, as a biased opinion, I like our ARC software and I think that's an awesome way to start. We have, it's an ecosystem of tools actually, so it's not just one thing, but, uh, we have a free desktop tool and it, it, it, it lets you put it on a, a Mac and experience sort of virtualization, containerization.

It uses OCI compression, which is an open standard outside of Mac in general. But what that lets you do is, uh, check your your build into something like GitHub and pass it around amongst your team. So it starts to take a person that's just, again, used to a singular desktop environment and get them used to code sharing and image building and pipeline building and tool using.

And that's a a, a nice way to sort of start down the trail of the DevOps ecosystem. And then, you know, our company and AWS also make it super easy to start to consume Mac as compute in the cloud. So Mac Stadium, you can go on a portal and you can click it and you can get a Mac, uh, Amazon, you can get an EC2 Mac and we're buddies also.

So you can actually go to Amazon and get ORCA on EC2 Mac and Amazon, nothing but net. So there's a, there's a couple of different ways, but we provide easy integrations off of that too. Again, you kind of wanna meet the developer where they live.

So people are really familiar with GitHub tooling and Jenkins and all these sort of traditional build tools. And those plug right into these tools that we're talking about today and make it sort of a easy way to start. You can write your code and press go, it hits the pipeline and then this software takes care of the rest.

So, which is easier, is it easier to teach a Mac developer things like CI and Kubernetes, or is it easier to teach the software engineers that know that stuff already about how to support Mac developers? I, I also, great question. I I would tell you, I mean, from an opinionated perspective, get convincing the DevOps engineer that Max not scary is somewhat, it, it, it's, uh, a harder first conversation, but much easier once you get 'em to believe you because it's plugged right in.

I think with, and the, I think the only reason that's an easier go is that, um, with the CI on the Apple side, from a pure Apple developer perspective, they really are used, they're about the work and the development. So it's teaching them, you know, broader, philosophical, what is DevOps, what is ci? And that's just, that's just a learning curve that they, you know, typically have to do.

So they'd rather stay in their dev world. Well, folks you heard in here, hey, it's kind of like peanut butter and jelly. We had both of them before we put them together, but once we put 'em together, people are eating a lot more peanut butter and drilling sandwiches.

Hey, Absolutely, absolutely. I like it. Orca is peanut butter is, is a, is a good sandwich for me.

So there You, there you go. Hey Chris, thanks for being on the show. Yeah, absolutely.

I appreciate it. All right. And back to you guys in the studio.