Moving Pinterest’s iOS Builds to Autoscaled EC2 Mac

Senior Developer Advocate Oliver Koo from Pinterest shared the story of his team’s evolution from on-prem physical hardware to modern cloud-hosted architecture on AWS EC2 Mac at UnblockConf '21. The catalyst for change was the increasing difficulty and time spent maintaining physical machines, which detracted from more impactful work. To improve developer experience and app quality, Pinterest decided to modernize their iOS CI/CD infrastructure by moving to AWS EC2 Macs. This new mobile CI architecture allowed them to scale build clusters to meet demand using Buildkite Agent Scaler. The team also leveraged various AWS services such as Secrets Manager, Elastic Block Store (EBS), Relational Database Service (RDS), and Cloudwatch for better security, storage, and metrics management. As a result, they achieved an 18.4% improvement in speed, 80.5% less CI-related build failures, and a 43% reduction in upgrade times.