In 2020, I was in a cab leaving the Square office in SF, where I’d just completed interviewing for a “macOS CI Site Reliability Engineer” role. In that cab, I was told that AWS was secretly developing a product that would allow running Apple hardware directly in EC2. Just a couple of hours prior, my soon-to-be manager and I had discussed the possibility of shifting Square’s self-hosted datacenter Mac CI cluster to some other colo vendor or cloud provider.
AWS announced EC2 Mac at re:Invent 2020 later that year, timed with Apple’s own press release. Apple had just released Big Sur with a new addition to its macOS Licensing Terms and Conditions: a section about a 24-hour minimum lease period.
Fast-forward exactly four years, and this past week I had the pleasure of speaking at AWS re:Invent 2024 in Las Vegas alongside one of the primary instigators of EC2 Mac, Manish Rathaur.
In this session (CMP210), I detail Block’s migration from a self-managed Mac CI cluster to EC2 Mac. You can check out the video recording of the session below!
