Unparalleled Control: How Life360 Optimizes Build Performance with Orka Cluster

About Life360

With over 79 million monthly active users and growing, Life360 is the go-to mobile app for modern family safety and connectivity. Life360 helps families in 195 countries stay connected and protected by offering real-time location sharing and emergency alerts to keep your loved ones protected, all in one cohesive app.



The Life360 team consists of 300 involved in engineering alone and 80 mobile developers evenly split between Android and iOS, with only a couple of iOS developers on the core release team (sometimes only one).

Lack of VM control was costing the team time and money

It’s a tale as old as time – The Life360 team originally started on-prem with a few Mac minis and quickly found that they needed a more robust solution in the cloud for iOS builds.



The team started using a popular CIaaS solution for iOS and Android builds. While this was an improvement from on-prem, it was not the scalable, cost-effective solution that Life360 wanted.



“We used it out of convenience, but it didn’t give us the level of control we needed,” said Ben Galperin, Life360 Mobile Build & Release Engineering Team Lead. “The actual VMs we received weren’t up to par—they were slow and felt like a black box to us.”



The Life360 team also found this popular CIaaS solution was slow at updating their versions of Xcode and operating systems. With several issues piling up, the team started to search for a new solution that better suited their needs, the most important being control over their build agents.



With the goal to improve the Life360 iOS mobile app, the team wanted to figure out how to seamlessly acquire resources to build using Xcode in the cloud. They considered options like AWS EC2, but discovered they would get more ‘bang for their buck’ with MacStadium’s Orka Cluster solution.

The Orka difference – Improved build speed, availability, and stability

Life360 transitioned to Orka Cluster for more streamlined iOS build management. While the core release team are the primary users of the solution, the entire mobile development team benefits from jobs running on VMs distributed by Orka Cluster.



Orka Cluster provides simplified, controlled virtualization and orchestration by allowing the core release team to quickly spin up specific VMs extremely fast.



"Orka gives us exceptional control over agent availability," said Galperin. "Whether we’re spinning up resources for specific team requests, rolling out operating system updates, or conducting experimental testing, we can create and customize new images to exact specifications and deploy them whenever needed. Speed and reliability are key when spinning up VMs, and having the ability to quickly build environments to our team's standards has helped us stay ahead of schedule and meet our goals efficiently." 

Support your growing team by letting Orka Cluster handle 4x the work

After moving to Orka Cluster, the Life360 team saw not only an increase in build speed processes, but the ability to scale their mobile app more than ever before.



The Life360 app has grown significantly over the past several years, with more test suites to run and new features being built. The team has doubled its growth of iOS engineers within the past four years, emphasizing their priority to fully optimize and control build agents.



"Over the past four years, our developer count has nearly doubled, and our use of pipeline and cloud resources has grown even more," said Galperin. "We're constantly adding new tools and analyzers, and per developer, the workload Orka supports has likely tripled—possibly even quadrupled."



The ability to quickly create an image and customize it exactly how the team wants has been the biggest game-changer. With the successful implementation of Orka Cluster, the Life360 team is looking to expand Orka’s abilities to others in the organization, including test engineers who want to leverage Orka Cluster to run UI tests.

Conclusion

Orka Cluster has enabled Life360 to scale efficiently, optimize build performance, and gain complete control over its iOS development pipeline. With faster builds, increased stability, and the flexibility to tailor resources to their exact needs, Life360 has been able to support its growing team and continuously enhance its mobile app.



For any fast-growing development team looking to streamline iOS builds, eliminate tedious processes, and future-proof their business, Orka Cluster offers a powerful, scalable solution that helps developers do what they do best – build great apps. 

Ready to see success with Orka Cluster like Life360?