CircleCI Introduces M1 Support for Apple Developers to Aid in Speed and Flexibility as Pressure to Deliver Grows

CircleCI maintains cutting edge macOS support by being the first highly scalable CI provider to offer M1 support for cloud and self-hosted applications

SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–CircleCI, the leading continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform, today announced its first M1 resource to provide customers with record-breaking build speed that will bring their software delivery to the next level.

This addition meets the burgeoning market demand for convenient, cloud-hosted Apple silicon support and helps development teams keep up with Apple’s hardware innovation velocity. This means that the more than 30 million developers who build Apple applications now have access to a large, cloud-based M1 resource that features 8 CPU/12 GB RAM for optimal storage and speed.

As the most comprehensive CI/CD provider, CircleCI offers superior cross-platform support to provide Apple developers with the flexibility and convenience required to build, test, and ship quality code.

“Running macOS projects using CircleCI’s M1 resource speeds up builds by up to 2x, providing Apple developers the ability to ship new products, feature enhancements, and bug fixes in record time at a fraction of the cost of other offerings,” said Alexa Loper, Senior Product Manager, CircleCI.

Key benefits include:

Increased build speed for a better product experience: In benchmark testing, M1 set a new standard for build velocity by boosting macOS job speed by up to 2x. This is particularly useful for iOS teams as it expedites the App Store review process and helps get apps approved and published quicker.
More convenient end-to-end testing, including GPU tests: CircleCI’s M1 resource includes hardware acceleration to transfer tasks typically done by software running on the CPU to the GPU for faster processing times. This makes for fast, effective, and smooth GPU tests within the pipeline that provide rapid feedback about the visual effects within applications and help minimize breaking changes before shipping updates.

Engineers at companies like Axios rely on CircleCI’s iOS support to scale and have seen 25 percent faster builds. The time that developers used to spend on patching and upgrading can now be devoted to keeping Axios’s infrastructure healthy and moving the company forward.

“As Apple’s silicon has become increasingly popular due to its performance and efficiency, its relevance and importance has commensurately exploded amongst developer populations,” said Stephen O’Grady, Principal Analyst with RedMonk. “CircleCI’s M1 support is intended to satisfy precisely this demand by allowing developers to bring CI workloads to their preferred high performance hardware.”

“The swift support for Apple M1 aligns with CircleCI’s mission to provide developer focused CI/CD solutions. M1 support on CircleCI can help teams stay ahead of constantly evolving software delivery challenges and maintain best practices by building with the latest technologies,” said Katie Norton, Senior Research Analyst, IDC.

Read this blog post to learn more.

Apple silicon and Dedicated Host (AWS) resource classes will be available in all paid plans later this year.

About CircleCI

CircleCI is the leading continuous integration and delivery platform for software innovation at scale. With intelligent automation and delivery tools, CircleCI is used by the world’s best engineering teams to radically reduce the time from idea to execution. The company has been recognized as an innovative leader in cloud-native continuous integration by independent research firms and industry awards like the DEVIES, Forbes’ Best Startup Employers of the Year, and Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500™.

Founded in 2011 and headquartered in downtown San Francisco with a global, remote workforce, CircleCI is venture-backed by Base10, Greenspring Associates, Eleven Prime, IVP, Sapphire Ventures, Top Tier Capital Partners, Baseline Ventures, Threshold Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, Owl Rock Capital, Next Equity Partners, Heavybit and Harrison Metal Capital. Learn more at https://circleci.com.

Contacts

Summer Falgiano, CircleCI

press@circleci.com