I guess macOS was designed for a user, not for the ops or engineers, so this is why its customization and usage for CI/CD are not trivial (compared to something Linux-based). A smart guess, huh? Configuration Management Native Apple’s Mobile device management (a.k.a MDM) and Jamf is probably the most potent combination for macOS configuration. But as much as it’s mighty, it is a cumbersome combination, and Jamf is not free....
Updated on the 23rd of October, 2021: Terraform AWS provider now supports Dedicated Hosts natively In November 2021, AWS announced the support for Mac mini instances. I believe this is huge, even despite the number of constraints this solution has. This offering opens the door to seamless macOS CI/CD integration into existing AWS infrastructure. So here is a quick-start example of creating the dedicated host and the instance altogether using Terraform....
Amazon EC2 Mac Instances Something cool and powerful with inevitable trade-offs. As everything in this world. AWS announced EC2 macOS-based instances on the 30th of November 2020, and after more than a month of tests, I would like to share some findings and impressions about it. First of all, the things you can easily find, but it’s still worth to say: The new instance family is called mac1.metal. Guess we should expect mac2 or mac3; otherwise, why did they put a number in the name?...
A simple but cool announcement from AWS — AWS CloudShell. A tool for ad-hoc AWS management via CLI directly in your browser. I like when AWS releases something simple to understand and yet powerful. So it is not another DevOps Guru, believe me :) Yes, this is similar to the shells that GCE and Azure have. No, you can’t access your instances from it, so it’s not a jump server (bastion host)....
Lookup plugins for Ansible allow you to do a lot of cool things. One of them is to securely pass sensitive information to your playbooks. If you manage some apps in AWS with Ansible, then using Parameter Store or Secrets Manager along with it might greatly improve your security. Variables with SSM Parameter Store Let’s say you have some variables defined in ‘defaults/main.yaml’ file of your role or maybe in group_vars....