Virtualized iOS builds at Shopify

They are deviating from standard PC architecture quickly with the introduction of things like the T1/T2 chips. They will want to depend on these things at some point.

The only 2 use-cases I can see for virtualised macOS are remote development/test machines, to which their answer would be "buy a real, local, Mac", and for continuous integration, for which their answer is currently fuzzy, but their acquisition of BuddyBuild makes me think they are likely to launch some sort of CI for developers in the future.

>It took us about four months to implement the new infrastructure on top of Anka with a small team

Quite a lot I expect.

My gut feeling guess based on "small team, 4 months" would be around $200k for the initial development + a single full time employee for the future for maintenance and improvements. Add opportunity costs on top for focusing on something that's not their core business.

(Assuming US salaries, benefits, taxes and any related costs such as office space, equipment etc.)

But I'm probably biased as I spent 4 years of my life building and running a company that built a cloud based CI service for iOS, so that others wouldn't have to..