Once in a blue moon, true organizational transformation can take less than 24 hours.
It took just one spin of Earth’s axis for Flipboard’s lead iOS engineer, Colin Caufield, to successfully overhaul not just how the company maintained its iOS application infrastructure, but where. A few days after that, Caufield’s team was saying goodbye to the company’s on-premises Mac build machine once and for all. Voilà—Flipboard’s entire Mac build process now existed in the AWS cloud.
Understanding how Flipboard got to there takes an understanding of where it came from. For the better part of a decade, Flipboard—an award-winning news and social media aggregator, with web, mobile, and desktop editions and over 100 million users—had run iOS virtualization through a Mac mini stored away in a closet in the company’s California offices. Affectionately known within the team as ‘Bender’, the Mac was appreciated but limiting. It could achieve the heavy lifting Flipboard’s developers required of it: creating the betas needed to update Flipboard’s iOS application, testing through a low-level automated user interface (UI), and uploading builds to the app store. However, it could only handle a few of Flipboard’s builds each day—limiting their pace of innovation.
When COVID-19 hit, Bender quickly lost its charm. With the company’s employees working from their homes across the world, maintaining Bender became burdensome, to say the least. “All of a sudden,” Caufield explains, “the small chore of going into the closet to flip the machine on and off again suddenly became: Who's in California? Who can drive to the office?”
Caufield’s team knew the time had finally come to migrate its iOS build pipeline on macOS to the cloud. Just in time, however, fate intervened. Over at AWS, a team was already hard at work on precisely the type of service Flipboard needed.
One step ahead
Turning to AWS for the latest technologies was nothing new for Flipboard—its relationship with AWS actually dated back to the company’s earliest days. When Flipboard had just launched, in mid-2010, Greg Scallan—now the company’s Vice President of Engineering—called up a friend at Amazon. Scallan, considering a physical data center to house Flipboard’s infrastructure, was curious about the AWS cloud solution—which, at the time, was a very new concept in market. Scallan knew data centers well; he had built them before. But cloud was a far less proven approach. Still, he wanted an expert’s opinion.
AWS is the real deal, his friend told him. Go for it.
So Scallan went for it. At the time, the decision to host many of Flipboard’s compute needs with AWS was met with skepticism. But Scallan trusted his instincts—and that trust has paid off. The decision would become instrumental to the company’s progress. Throughout the years, Scallan recalls how he would often identify a need or a problem only to learn that the team at AWS was one step ahead: either with a solution already available, or on the verge of being released into the market.
Such anticipatory thinking has come to define AWS and its pace of innovation. In a fast-moving industry, this means listening closely to direct customer feedback, constantly hunting for signals and patterns, and then building products to address customer needs. As AWS looked to support every workload, it heard a growing call for the capability to run macOS builds in its cloud—just like Flipboard was searching for.
So AWS did what it does best—it started innovating on behalf of customers. The AWS team designed and built a proprietary blend of Apple hardware and their AWS Nitro System to create a service that allows developers to build and run their Apple workloads from within the AWS Cloud. EC2 Mac instances are designed to allow customers to seamlessly provision and access macOS compute environments for building apps for iPhone, iPad, Safari, and other Apple products.
But what differentiates EC2 Mac instances from a standalone Mac mini like Bender is the Nitro System—the backbone of Amazon EC2. To power EC2 Mac instances, Nitro enables the Apple Mac mini to run just like any other Linux or Windows EC2 instances, through the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and startup from the company’s Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) service —perfect for supporting secure, scalable, and performant network and storage requirements. Together, this unique combination of hardware and software gives developers the ability to launch any number of macOS environments in the AWS cloud from anywhere in a matter of minutes. For a company like Flipboard, it was just what the doctor ordered.
Going for it—again
When Caufield learned of the opportunity to try EC2 Mac instances from his account team, he was cautiously optimistic. The problem was, the niche vendors they had tried in the past had consistently fallen short of their expectations. Still, he told Scallan he’d love to take a day and just play around with it. Scallan agreed, intrigued but unsure what to expect.
What no one expected was for Caufield to have the new service up and running within the first 24 hours—and, 48 hours after that, all of Flipboard’s Mac workloads successfully migrated to EC2. It took less than a week to erase a decade-old challenge.
To Caufield, the value was immediately visible—literally. Sitting at his home machine, running a new Mac instance, he started moving the cursor around the desktop. For years, he’d been used to the lag inherent to working with Bender. Now, the little arrow swept across the screen smoothly. “Oh,” Caufield recalls thinking. “This is going to make my life so much easier.”
In reality, it has made everyone’s lives much easier. EC2 Mac instances have cut Flipboard’s beta build time from 20 minutes to just five, an efficiency increase that now allows Caufield’s team to be far more collaborative with designers and creators on potential app modifications. A designer can come to Caufield and ask to see a change—a button in a different place, for instance—and instead of waiting 20 minutes, the update will actualize in a fraction of the time. EC2 Mac instances’ bare metal performance and dedicated resourcing also make automated UI testing significantly faster and easier, meaning Caufield’s team has a vastly improved ability to identify potential app issues before they ever reach consumers. More collaboration, stronger product, better end user experience. Everybody won.
Back at AWS, they are already back at work anticipating additional customer needs and have recently announced EC2 M1 Mac instances in preview. M1 Mac instances are built on Apple M1 Mac mini computers, powered by the AWS Nitro System, and will deliver up to 60% better price performances over current x86-based EC2 Mac instances.
This story was produced by WIRED Brand Lab for Amazon Web Services.
