Blazing fast continuous integration at Box

Since signing on with MacStadium, Box has been able to leverage a dedicated private cloud built on genuine Mac hardware to its full potential and speed up their CI pipeline. Using MacStadium infrastructure that combines Apple computers, VMware virtualization, and Pure Storage, Box was able to reduce the time it took to clone a virtual machine from 20-30 minutes down to about 10 seconds. This was important as Box wanted one-time-use VMs to ensure a clean environment for every build, for every developer. With VMware, the Box team is able to parallelize their functional tests and get results quickly, while having other VMs run Xcode builds as fast as possible. "This is pretty powerful with VMware. It's something that we wouldn't have the capability of doing if we were on bare metal hardware. Having an infrastructure provider like MacStadium is huge to us," said Ray Sennewald, senior software engineer at Box. To learn more about how the Box team improved CI performance using MacStadium.