Case Study: Homebrew achieves CI automation and happier developers with MacStadium Orka

Homebrew eliminates 8+ hour CI bottlenecks with MacStadium

Homebrew, a widely used open-source package manager for macOS and Linux, faced significant challenges with their CI automation. Their manual VMware setup struggled to handle the intensive CPU demands of building and testing thousands of software packages, causing pull requests and testing jobs to take over 24 hours and creating bottlenecks that frustrated their volunteer-run team. They needed a more configurable and scalable solution than other CI services offered.

MacStadium provided a solution with its Orka (Orchestration with Kubernetes on Apple) platform. By implementing Orka, Homebrew gained the ability to automate the creation and scaling of macOS virtual machines on demand via a developer-friendly CLI and API. This resulted in a complete elimination of major CI bottlenecks for multiple years, drastically reducing manual intervention and rapidly increasing developer happiness for their volunteer contributors.

Homebrew