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orchard

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SSH over gRPC or how Orchard simplifies accessing VMs in private networks

We started developing Orchard, an orchestrator for Tart, with the requirement that it should allow users to access virtual machines running on worker nodes in private networks that users might not have access to.

At the same time, we wanted to enable users to access VMs on these remote workers just as easily as they’d access network services on their local Tart VMs.

While these features sound great on paper, they pose a technical problem: how do we connect to the remote workers, let alone VMs running on these workers, if we can’t assume that these workers will be easily reachable? And how do we establish an SSH connection with a VM running on a remote worker through all these hoops?

Announcing Orchard orchestration for managing macOS virtual machines at scale

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.

What problem are we trying to solve?

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.