February 2022 Summaries

The Elastic CI Stack for EC2 Mac is a new open-source solution designed to help mobile teams scale their CI/CD pipelines by leveraging AWS and Buildkite, offering increased reliability, security, and speed. Pinterest's own mobile CI pipelines, which utilize a similar architecture, experienced significant improvements, including an 80% reduction in build failures and a 43% decrease in upgrade times after migrating from self-managed hardware to this system. The 1.0 release includes a CloudFormation template that manages an Auto Scaling Group and Launch Template customizations for running the Buildkite Agent on EC2 Mac instances. Future updates will include support for M1 processors and new autoscaling options. Teams interested in exploring this solution can access documentation on GitHub or engage with communities such as the Mobile Native Foundation forums and the Buildkite Community Slack for further collaboration and support.

The new group step feature in pipeline management allows teams with large and complex pipelines to organize their processes more effectively by displaying steps in logical groupings and nesting them under a top-level group. This is particularly useful for tasks like package security audits, where it provides a clear visual indication of any security vulnerabilities, thus enabling quick diagnosis and resolution before proceeding to deployment steps. The feature also includes an optional depends_on attribute, which allows for creating dependencies between groups of steps, ensuring that certain processes must pass before others begin. This enhances both the visual simplicity and operational control of pipeline flows, optimizing performance and diagnostics, and providing teams with a more streamlined and organized approach to pipeline management.

Continuous Integration (CI) is an automated process that helps developers maintain high code quality and catch bugs early in the development cycle. By automating linting, testing, and other manual processes, CI tools like fastlane and Buildkite Pipelines can significantly speed up app development. This blog demonstrates how to create and run automated CI pipelines with fastlane for iOS apps, using SwiftLint for code style enforcement, scan for test automation, and xcbeautify for displaying Xcode test output. The process involves setting up a Fastfile to define workflows (lanes) and customizing Buildkite's CI templates to fit the project requirements. By adopting CI, developers can focus on writing code while their infrastructure runs tests automatically, catching issues early and ensuring consistent code quality.

Oliver Koo, a Senior Mobile Engineer at Pinterest, discussed the evolution of the company's iOS Continuous Integration (CI) infrastructure from on-premises physical hardware to a modern cloud-based architecture using AWS EC2 Mac at UnblockConf '21. The transition aimed to alleviate the cumbersome and disruptive maintenance of physical machines and improve the developer experience by enabling the Pinterest team to focus on more impactful efforts. This migration allowed Pinterest to implement a flexible mobile CI architecture with autoscaling groups that adjust to demand, facilitated by AWS services and tools such as RDS, Cloudwatch, Packer, Bazel, Terraform, and Buildkite. The new infrastructure significantly enhanced build speed and reliability, reducing CI-related build failures and upgrade times, thus leading to happier engineers and end users. This transformation showcases the benefits of cloud-hosted architecture in improving operational efficiency and software quality.