Week in Review: Orka, Mac Pro, WWDC, AltConf and more!

Whew, this has been a busy week at MacStadium! Taking a cue from our good friend James Dempsey, we thought it was a good idea to put together our own “Week in Review.” Read on for all the great stuff that happened in the first week of June alone.

Mac Pro

At the WWDC keynote on Monday, Apple announced a long-awaited new Mac Pro. Naturally, we’re as excited as anyone to get our hands on this powerful new machine. We have supported every major Mac form factor from Xserves to minis to iMacs to every flavor of Mac Pro, and we will get this newest Pro available to our customers as quickly as possible. We’re already in planning mode based on what we saw in the keynote, taking into account thermal, power, serviceability, and scalability as we do with every Mac in our data centers. When the new Mac Pro is ready to ship, we’ll be ready for a quick turnaround to share its potential with our customers. In fact, we are confident that within weeks of the first new Mac shipment we’ll make these machines available. Subscribe to our newsletter to keep up-to-date on the new Mac Pro at MacStadium.

Orka

On Tuesday, we were excited to announce Orka: Orchestration with Kubernetes on Apple. Orka is a new virtualization layer for Mac build infrastructure based on Docker and Kubernetes technology. Orka offers the first and only solution for orchestrating macOS in a cloud environment using Kubernetes on genuine Apple Mac hardware.

Our SVP of Software Development, Chris Chapman, gave a presentation during AltConf to describe what Orka is, why we developed it, and how it can help Mac development teams. Check out the video of his session below. Starting this week, Orka is now in public beta, and we are gearing up for a full release later this summer. Learn more about Orka and sign-up for our mailing list to get updates.

AltConf

Again this year, MacStadium was a proud sponsor of AltConf: the Alternative Apple Developer Conference. Held next door to WWDC, AltConf is a free, community-driven event with four days of amazing content. In addition to Chris’ Orka presentation, we were also proud to host a panel discussion at AltConf called “CI Best Practices for iOS and macOS App Development.” Panelists included Daniel Hagen, Director of IT for Aspyr Media, publisher of popular Mac games like Call of Duty® and SimCity™; Debayan Majumdar, Sr. Mobile Tools Engineer at Pandora, the largest streaming music provider in the US; and Peter Steinberger, CEO of PSPDFKit, the go-to solution for integrating PDFs into your app. The group talked about their Mac infrastructure deployments, how they use virtualization to manage their CI processes, their best practice configurations, their favorite automation tricks, and other lessons learned from some of the largest and most demanding continuous integration setups in the world.

WWDC

Last but not least, Apple made some particularly great announcements at this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC, or Dub Dub to its friends). In addition to the new Mac Pro, of course, we know Mac and iOS developers will be excited about iOS 13, iPadOS 13, macOS Catalina, Swift UI, and more. Check out this WWDC coverage roundup from 9to5Mac for all the details.