MacStadium Brings macOS Virtualization to Everyone for Free with Orka Desktop
10 July 2024 - 9:00PM
Business Wire
Easily create, test, and run macOS VMs locally.
Share the lightweight images globally.
MacStadium, the industry-leading Mac cloud services provider
offering Mac cloud compute, virtualization solutions, and remote
desktops, today unveiled Orka Desktop, a free, local macOS
virtualization tool. Orka Desktop is a desktop virtualization
program that allows you to create and manage macOS virtual machines
locally with an easy-to-use GUI interface.
With more developers building, testing and deploying macOS and
iOS apps, Orka Desktop becomes a critical virtualization tool
providing reliable, standardized development environments.
According to an Apple enterprise report, 76% of large enterprises
report an increase in their use of Apple Devices in the past year.
Virtualization enhances consistency between development, testing
and production phases, significantly improving operational
efficiency.
“Orka Desktop provides the tools to allow developers to create
many different macOS image versions locally, commit those into a
shared repository, and pass them around for collaboration.
Developers can also scale further by pulling those resources into
an Orka Cluster at MacStadium where you can orchestrate workloads
with cloud resources,” said Chris Chapman, MacStadium’s chief
technology officer. “Because Orka Desktop wraps and compresses your
macOS image with an Open Container Initiative (OCI)-compliant
specification and sparseness, it can mean a 90GB image is reduced
as significantly as 80% shrinking it to nearly 15GB, which makes it
much easier to move around. The OCI wrapper also allows teams to
work with most standards-based registries.”
“Developers regularly use virtualization tooling, but most
aren’t aware of the fundamental differences and optimizations that
tools can provide for Mac. We designed Orka Desktop to be the most
performant and standards based macOS virtualization tool for Apple
Silicon. Users can create or download custom macOS images locally
for their own personal use, and collaborate with team members using
familiar workflow, versioning, audit, and review controls.
Ultimately, teams get the consistent environments that they need,”
said Jason Davis, MacStadium’s chief product officer.
Orka Desktop allows developers to spin up macOS VMs quickly and
easily. This is an ideal tool for developers who want to learn more
about Mac virtualization as well as development team members who
want to build and test locally. Some key features that customers
can expect include:
- Orka Desktop offers free local macOS virtualization, providing
developers with powerful tools to create, package, and distribute
VMs easily without cost.
- Orka Desktop achieves near-native performance on Apple Silicon,
with virtualization overhead as low as 5% in most cases.
- Developers can create a seamless workflow for building and
sharing OCI images, simplifying content collaboration and
distribution.
- An easy-to-use GUI interface supporting actions on VMs from
local machines to the cloud, enhancing efficiency and
flexibility.
Existing Orka customers can use Orka Desktop as an extension of
their current MacStadium Orka Cluster, facilitating smoother
transitions from local development to global deployment. This
enhances team collaboration and offers safer and more reliable
testing environments.
Orka Desktop is now available. To learn more, please visit
https://bit.ly/download-orka-desktop.
About MacStadium
Founded in 2011 and headquartered in Atlanta, MacStadium is a
private cloud services provider and software-as-a-service leader
delivering scalable and secure enterprise cloud solutions
exclusively for macOS. The company’s suite of advanced
software-enabled infrastructure, combined with its innovative
technology, delivers the security, performance, reliability and
flexibility its DevOps customers require for successful app
development on Apple devices. Powered by MacStadium, Orka®
(Orchestration with Kubernetes on Apple) Platform is the only
virtualization layer available for Mac build infrastructure based
on popular Docker and Kubernetes technology. MacStadium is a Summit
Partners portfolio company with multi-site operations in the U.S.
and EU. Please follow the company on social @macstadium or visit
macstadium.com.
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Treble Matt Grant macstadium@treblepr.com