Scalable CI/CD Pipelines for iOS
Article Summary
Alberto De Bortoli from Just Eat Takeaway reveals how his team built a fully automated iOS CI system that supports 40+ developers with just 5 bare metal instances. No manual SSH. No weekend waste. Pure infrastructure-as-code.
Just Eat Takeaway migrated from Jenkins to GitHub Actions in 2023, rebuilding their entire iOS CI infrastructure from scratch. The team leveraged Packer, Terraform, and AWS EC2 Mac instances to create a scalable, code-defined system that automatically provisions runners, connects to GitHub Actions, and scales based on developer demand across multiple time zones.
Key Takeaways
- New AMIs deploy in 70-100 minutes, enabling Xcode 15.1 availability hours after release
- Auto-scaling reduces weekend costs by scaling down to 1 instance at 11:59 PM Friday
- Runners auto-connect to GitHub Actions via custom daemons, eliminating manual SSH/VNC setup
- Tart VMs tested but rejected due to 40%+ performance degradation versus bare metal
- Complete infrastructure defined in Terraform with single-command deployment and scaling
Just Eat Takeaway built a fully automated, scalable iOS CI system that provisions configured runners in under 8 minutes and supports 40+ developers with minimal infrastructure.
About This Article
Just Eat Takeaway's iOS teams each ran their own CI setup. Some used in-house Jenkins, while others had CircleCI or GitLab CI. This fragmentation meant a lot of maintenance work and inconsistent practices across teams.
Alberto De Bortoli's team moved everything to GitHub Actions. They used Packer to define macOS instance configurations in code and Terraform to manage the infrastructure. This made deployments reproducible across the organization.
The setup handles 40+ iOS developers on just 5 bare metal instances on average. New AMIs take 70-100 minutes to build, and the entire infrastructure can redeploy in under 8 minutes.