Improving the CI/CD pipeline for mobile app development
Article Summary
Johnson Li from Coupang reveals how migrating from Mac minis to AWS EC2 transformed their mobile CI/CD pipeline. Their team was drowning in 3,000+ daily builds with 1-hour wait times.
Coupang's mobile engineering team rebuilt their entire CI/CD infrastructure to support rapid feature development across global teams. The article details their migration from physical Mac mini servers to AWS, covering six major technical improvements that dramatically reduced build times and costs.
Key Takeaways
- Cut build time by 45% and static analysis time by 77%
- Reduced maximum CI job wait time from 1 hour to under 15 minutes
- Achieved 16% AWS cost savings through auto-scaling implementation
- Git reference repositories eliminated full code downloads on every build
- System now supports 9x traffic with 2-hour setup for new build agents
Coupang saved 5% of collaboration time across 18 teams while cutting costs and scaling to support multiple product lines beyond their core e-commerce app.
About This Article
Coupang's CI/CD pipeline used fixed physical Mac mini servers that couldn't keep up with demand. Hundreds of developers needed to download large codebases daily, and the system had no way to scale automatically.
The team switched to AWS EC2 macOS instances and set up Git reference repositories as local mirrors on build machines. This let engineers pull only the code they needed instead of downloading the entire repository every time they built.
New build agents now take 2 hours to set up instead of much longer. The system can support any new product in 2 man-days, and they eliminated the security risk of connecting office machines directly to production.