Scaling Mobile Device Management
Article Summary
Uber's Client Platform Engineering team faced a massive challenge: rolling out MDM to 20,000+ employees across hundreds of global offices where standard Apple enrollment wouldn't work everywhere.
The CPE team at Uber needed to supplement their Chef-based endpoint management with MDM to support new macOS security features. But global procurement realities meant some employees could use DEP while others couldn't, creating a fractured enrollment experience that threatened to leave thousands of devices unmanaged.
Key Takeaways
- Built UMAD tool to unify DEP and non-DEP enrollment workflows into one experience
- Enrolled 16,000 employees in 6 weeks, fixing 4,000 misconfigured machines
- Created Nudge wrapper to standardize OS updates across all macOS versions
- Reached 87% adoption of latest macOS within 90 days with zero support tickets
- Open sourced API-driven Chef cookbooks to manage MDM without hardcoded values
Critical Insight
By building custom wrappers around MDM enrollment and OS updates, Uber achieved 92% MDM enrollment in 10 weeks and near-universal OS standardization with minimal support burden.
