About Adoptium

Adoptium is an open source initiative stewarded by the Eclipse Foundation, a nonprofit organization that supports a global community of open source software projects, which promotes and delivers high-quality, TCK-certified Java runtimes and associated technologies, backed by 60 dedicated contributors and 11 member companies, including Java ecosystem leaders and enterprise users. The Strategic Members of the Adoptium Working Group include Alibaba Cloud, Azul Systems, Google, Microsoft, Red Hat, and Rivos.



Adoptium provides a reliable, secure, and up-to-date runtime, with its most notable project being the Eclipse Temurin distribution. The initiative embraces existing standards and supports a wide range of hardware and cloud platforms, enabling developers to build and run Java-based applications with confidence, performance, and portability across diverse environments.

How were you handling Mac development before MacStadium?

George: Primarily, we've always relied on cloud sponsorship from companies, MacStadium being one of the main ones. In the pre-Orka days, we had a lot of Mac minis running in the clouds. We did at one point have our own hosted co-location data center which we put some Mac minis in, but we pretty quickly realized it was easier to just let the experts handle it.

How are you using Orka today?

Stewart: Orka is used for building and testing the Eclipse Temurin Java runtime on macOS. We build it on a regular basis and run a very large set of tests on it. Some of the tests are from the OpenJDK project, and some are from other companies that have donated tests to us.



All of this is coordinated through Jenkins servers. We're using the Orka-Jenkins plugin to provision these machines, run the builds and the tests, and then shut them down again afterwards.

What led to your decision to choose Orka over another solution?

George: I think one of the big challenges when we started out was that we grew very fast as an open-source project. You kind of get this sort of fire underneath you, and very quickly, a lot of companies start depending on you. When we started, although I’d hate to admit it, we had a bunch of Mac minis sitting on desks and all sorts of things. It very quickly became a security concern to make sure the hardware we had was easy to tear down and rebuild. We wanted to have hardware in an environment where we could easily recreate the same build and test environment each time.



From a security perspective, we did not want to have to deal with the security behind the gateways of these systems. Keeping the minis in a datacenter with a lock and key was definitely one of the key considerations for us.



Stewart: One of the other things is the setup of the machines. We’re doing all that with Ansible. That’s what we use for all our machines – Windows, Linux, and everything else, including macOS. We have it that way to keep the systems up to date and consistent.

How large is your development team?

What teams use Orka for application and development testing?

George: We’re primarily using Orka for testing and production release, so everything we’re releasing is built on that hardware in a secure environment. We can be certain that with MacStadium, there is no foul play with our machines. We're releasing enterprise-grade binaries that are used by millions of people, so we want to make sure that they’re completely safe from the start. MacStadium helps us do that.

How does integrating Orka with CI/CD impact your workflows?

Stewart: I think it's scalability as much as anything else because previously, we were limited in the number of systems we had. Now, we can spin them up and pull them down as we need them. We’re not constantly having the machines connected. It also means that the machines are in a very well-known state. Those are the two big differences.

Have you experienced any improvements in performance after adopting Orka?

Stewart: We run builds, then we split off the tests into about eight jobs for each build. We’re potentially doing that on more than one release in parallel as well, so we might have more sets of eight. Being able to spin up more machines on demand when we need them means we can run jobs in parallel with Orka, whereas previously we might not have been able to if we didn't have that many machines.

What does your release cycle look like – daily, weekly, monthly?

Stewart: We generally build once a week because the upstream project that we build from creates tags in their repository once a week. We used to build 2-3 times a week, but we found it wasn’t necessary, and it was better to build from the specific tags that they’re producing.



Our final, fully supported release build is once a quarter. It’s a well-defined schedule at the upstream openjdk project. One was in January, and the last one was in April. We have new major releases in March and September as well. But, in general, we build early access builds for development and test use once a week. We are looking at a project for testing other builds, but it’s not fully in place at the moment. Orka will be very useful for that as well because of its dynamic nature.

Physical security is a huge benefit, but were there any compliance benefits as well?

George: Yes, definitely. We used to have all the minis with public IP addresses, so not only were we paying for machines we weren’t using, but they were also just sitting there being absolutely hammered.



We recently set up a lot more telemetry that helps us. Hundreds of thousands of incorrect authentication requests hit our build farm every week. One of the key things for us is being behind a firewall and not leaving a build machine open and vulnerable to anyone when it’s not being used. We’ve been going through our SLSA compliance around reproducibility of builds and security, and one of the key things was having a immutable building environment, so we can essentially recreate that exact same build state every single time. Orka really helped us gain compliance in reproducibility of builds and security that we could not achieve before.



Stewart: That’s true. That reproducibility piece is probably the most important thing that we have gotten from this. That was a big thing we were able to claim after moving to Orka. It's actually slightly more than immutable. You need to make sure that one environment, when you run one build, can’t impact the next build on the same machine.



Being able to effectively do a reimage by provisioning a new machine that is completely independent of the previous one is something we managed to do on Linux, but were never able to do on Mac until now. That’s something we would not have been able to do on the previous system.

How has your experience been with MacStadium’s support and documentation?

George: Everything has been good, I certainly can’t complain. To this point, every time we’ve had a problem, MacStadium helps us resolve it. At times, the documentation can be challenging around API versioning and Orka changing, but there are usually very minor changes that we work around.



Stewart: Yeah, I think that’s fair. MacStadium has been very good and willing to help us out, to get on calls, and to demo the systems to us. I’ve been very happy with MacStadium in that respect for sure.

How do you envision Orka helping Adoptium achieve its long-term goals?

Stewart: The main thing is having a secure, reliable infrastructure for Mac systems that allows us to keep up to date with new operating systems. We need to be able to easily test new operating systems so we can make sure we have the compatibility for the operating systems that our end-users are going to be using.



George: The key thing here is that it’s an open-source project. We aren’t directly paid to work on this. Keeping infrastructure as simple as possible is always one of our long-term goals. The more we can automate, the more stable we can make machines. The more we can just let computer systems be computer systems, the happier most of the contributors in our group are.



One of the biggest challenges we’ve always faced with non-dynamic machines is when a particular machine ends up in a different state, and we have to deal with a whole load of bug reports or someone complaining. The more we can keep a clean environment each time, the better it is, and the smoother it makes running our project. We’re releasing newer versions of Java all the time, but we’re still having to pull a lot of older ones, so our need for macOS machines is only increasing. We’re going to have to get more and more of these tested and released, and maintaining that quality is difficult.

How can other cloud providers support Adoptium?

George: The Adoptium community is open to receiving support from other cloud providers and the necessary tools to sustain all the releases and supported platforms. To know more about our Sponsorship program, you can contact our community by checking our page.

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