We're introducing a new improvement for the Tart usability experience: a Tart Guest Agent.
This agent provides automatic disk resizing, seamless clipboard sharing for macOS guests (a long-awaited feature), and the ability to run commands, without SSH and networking, using the new tart exec command.
As of recently, we include this agent in all non-vanilla Cirrus Labs images, so you likely won't need to do anything to benefit from these usability improvements.
Read on to learn why we chose to implement the agent from scratch in Golang, and which features we plan to add next.
This month we are celebrating one year since launching Cirrus Runners — managed Apple Silicon infrastructure for your
GitHub Actions. During the last 12 months we ran millions of workflows for our customers and now ready to share some insights
into price performance of them for our customers.
One of the key difference with Cirrus Runners is how they are getting billed for. Customers purchase Cirrus Runners via monthly subscription
that costs $150 per each Cirrus Runner. Each runner can be used 24 hours a day 7 days a week to run GitHub Actions workflows
for an organization. If there are more outstanding jobs than available runners then they are queued and executed as soon as
there is a free runner. This is different from how GitHub-managed GitHub Actions are billed for — you pay for each minute of execution time.
The benefit of a fixed price is that you can run as many jobs as you want without worrying about the cost. The downside is that
you need to make sure that you are using your runners efficiently. This is where the new dashboard comes in handy.
EC2 Mac Instances is a gem of engineering powered by AWS Nitro devices. Just imagine there is a physical Mac Mini with
a plugged in Nitro device that can push the physical power button!
This clever synergy between Apple Hardware and Nitro System allows seamless integration with VPC networking and booting macOS from an EBS volume.
In this blog post we’ll see how a virtualization solution like Tart can compliment and elevate experience with EC2 Mac Instances.
Today we are happy to announce general availability of Orchard – our new orchestrator to manage Tart virtual machines at scale.
In this post we’ll cover the motivation behind creating yet another orchestrator and why we didn’t go with Kubernetes or Nomad integration.
After releasing Tart we pretty quickly started getting requests about managing macOS virtual machines on a cluster of
Apple Silicon machines rather than just a single host which only allows a maximum of two virtual machines at a time.
By the end of 2022 the requests reached a tipping point, and we started planning.
TLDR: We are transitioning Tart's licensing from AGPL-3.0 to Fair Source 100. This change will
permit unlimited installations on personal computers, but organizations that exceed a certain number of server
installations utilizing 100 CPU cores will be required to obtain a paid license.
Exactly a year ago on February 11th 2022 we started working on Tart – a tiny CLI to run macOS virtual machines on Apple Silicon.
Three months later we successfully started using Tart in our own production system and decided to share Tart with everyone.
The goal was to establish a community of users and contributors to transform Tart from a small CLI to a robust tool
for various scenarios. Unfortunately, we were not successful in attracting a significant number of contributors.
It's important to note that we did have seven individuals who contributed to the development of Tart to the best of
their abilities. However, one of the challenges of contributing to Tart is that the skill set required for a contribution
is vastly different from the skill set typically possessed by regular Tart users in their daily work. Specifically,
a contributor needs to have knowledge of the Swift programming language, as well as a background in operating systems
and network stack. This is the reason why 98.8% of the code and all the major features were contributed by Cirrus Labs engineers.
