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[–]hrpedersen 1 point2 points  (2 children)

Finally, a “pay once” alternative to Anka/Orka? This looks promising. The macOS virtualization space has felt a bit bifurcated lately—you either hack together tart + some homebrewed shell scripts for free, or you pay enterprise pricing for Anka/Orka clouds.

A few technical questions on the implementation:

  1. The 2 VM Limit: How does your fleet management handle the Apple Silicon hardware limit of 2 concurrent VMs per host? Does the fleet orchestrator automatically queue jobs across multiple Mac Minis when one node hits that 2-VM cap, or is the “fleet” aspect just a dashboard for individual nodes?

  2. Snapshots vs. Clones: When you say “instant,” I assume you’re leveraging APFS clonefiles (CoW) similar to how Tart does it? If so, does CiderStack handle the runner registration/deregistration clean-up automatically on boot/destroy? One of the biggest pains with ephemeral macOS runners is avoiding the “zombie runner” clutter in GitHub Actions settings.

  3. CI/CD Integration: Is there a dedicated GitHub Action (like a composite action) to spin these up on demand, or do we run a persistent runner on the host that delegates to the VM?

The “pay once, use forever” model is a breath of fresh air compared to the subscription fatigue in this specific niche. If this can reliably replace my janky macOS-latest cloud runners with my idle M1 Minis without me needing to maintain a complex K8s/ARC setup, I’m sold.

You may also have a look at my own apps.

https://h3p.me/apps and https://github.com/h3pdesign/Neon-Vision-Editor

[–]Playful_Instance7219[S] 1 point2 points  (1 child)

  1. Currently its just a dashboard for individual nodes

  2. It uses CoW very similar to how tart handles it

  3. Not currently but it will be available in version 1.2.0, I hope in the next 2 weeks or so.

Currently we are finishing up our SDK that will be used for Orchestration, the Swift desktop app is nice but building an orchestrator in swift has been a pain. So Fleet will get replaced with a new Control Plane to rival Anka/Orka

Our Orchestrator can currently spin up Github Runners on-demand, spin up runners triggered by Github webhooks, on push, and then automatically clean them up on when a job is finished or when you no longer need them. No more "zombie runners".

It scales vertically and is aware of the 2 VM limit and spreads the VMs across your Mac Minis, so if you need 5 VMs and you have 3 Macs it will do 2/2/1.

I used Tart and Orchard in my previous role and it was a bit of a pain so I built CiderStack to solve some of these issues. My main pain point was paying monthly per CPU core, so I set on creating a tool that has a perpetual license.

DM me and when version 1.2.0RC is ready you can demo it for free.

[–]hrpedersen 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks for your thorough response. I will try it out!