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MacStadium Blog

Homebrew Tests Catalina on Orka

Participating in the Orka beta program this summer, Homebrew teamed up with MacStadium to test the macOS Catalina beta on Orka to great success.

Not many people may realize this, but MacStadium is a long-standing supporter of the Homebrew project -- the most popular way to install packages on macOS. MacStadium has a program to support open source efforts such as Homebrew, as we believe in building a community based on good code and best practices.

MacStadium's efforts increasingly align with Apple's philosophy: opinionated best practices that are easy to use. Homebrew also takes this philosophy, so given our existing relationship, we invited them to participate in our Orka beta program. One of the first asks Homebrew's project leader, Mike McQuaid, had was if Orka could run the macOS Catalina beta (10.15). The MacStadium team actually had a copy of Catalina working on June 13th, while Orka development was still in full swing, so they were happy to load it into Homebrew's environment.

The ability to get the macOS Catalina beta working so quickly comes from the Docker layer of the Orka stack. Despite being a robust and fault-tolerant system, providing the same experience has been a challenge. Orka runs on Kubernetes giving customers an enterprise-grade, industry-standard orchestration layer. But Kubernetes runs on almost any operating system so, in an unregulated system, Orka could be the world's best "hackintosh." Clearly, MacStadium does not want this, and therefore limits access to the underlying Orka code, as well as the small deviations from the community edition of Docker and CoreOS.

Orka users can expect clear instructions on making their own full Docker images with the public release of Orka, which was announced at DevOps World | Jenkins World San Francisco earlier this week.

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