We are happy to announce that the macOS tasks on Cirrus CI Cloud have switched to a new virtualization technology as well as overall architecture of the orchestration. This switch should be unnoticeable for the end users except that the tasks should become much faster since now each macos_instance of the Cirrus CI Cloud offering will utilize a full Mac Mini with 12 virtual CPUs and 24G of RAM.
Cirrus CI pioneered an idea of directly using compute services instead of requiring users to manage their own infrastructure, configuring servers for running CI jobs, performing upgrades, etc. Instead, Cirrus CI just uses APIs of cloud providers to create virtual machines or containers on demand. This fundamental design difference has multiple benefits comparing to more traditional CIs:
Most Continuous Integration vendors try to lock you not only by providing some unique features that were attractive in the first place but also by making you write hundreds of lines of YAML configuration unique to this particular CI or by making you configure all your scripts in the UI. No wonder it’s always a pain to migrate to another CI and it’s hard to justify the effort! There are so many things to rewrite from one YAML format into another YAML format.
Today we are happy to announce Cirrus CLI — an open source tool to run isolated tasks in any environment with Docker installed. Use one configuration format for running your CI builds the same way locally on your laptop or remotely in any CI. Read below to learn more about our motivation and technical details or jump right to the GitHub repository and try Cirrus CLI for yourself!
