Grab’s Mac Cloud Exit supercharges macOS CI/CD
Article Summary
Grab moved 250+ Mac minis from a US cloud to a Malaysian data center. The results? 40% faster builds and $2.4M saved.
Grab's engineering team details their journey from renting cloud macOS infrastructure to owning a colocated cluster in Southeast Asia. This deep dive covers the economics, technical decisions, and execution strategy behind their infrastructure migration.
Key Takeaways
- Build times improved 20-40% by moving closer to Git servers
- Projected $2.4M savings over 3 years versus cloud rental
- Zero-touch provisioning via Jamf MDM enables rack-to-production automation
- Bare-metal outperformed virtualization for their iOS CI/CD workloads
- Progressive migration ensured zero stability compromise during cutover
Critical Insight
At scale (200+ machines), owning colocated infrastructure delivered both dramatic cost savings and performance gains without sacrificing reliability.
