# Grab's Mac Cloud Exit supercharges macOS CI/CD

[Grab](https://yomu.fyi/company/grab) · Madushan Gamage · Nov 6, 2025

## Summary

Scaling iOS CI/CD workloads across multiple large mobile applications led to substantial expenses and queue delays under rented cloud macOS infrastructure. To mitigate network latency to Git servers and cut compute overhead, Grab relocated its build fleet from a US cloud provider to a colocation data center in Malaysia. The infrastructure deployment relies on over 200 bare-metal Mac minis across 42RU racks, purposefully avoiding virtualization solutions that introduced performance and stability penalties. Phased migration and guardrail monitoring verified cluster stability while achieving 20% to 40% reductions in pipeline and app build times. Operating the regional bare-metal cluster over an estimated three-year hardware replacement lifecycle is projected to yield 2.4 million USD in total cost of ownership savings.

## Takeaways

- Apple's EULA enforces a 24-hour minimum lease duration for macOS instances, which limits utilization efficiency and inflates cloud rental costs compared to Linux.
- Grab selected bare-metal Mac mini hardware over virtualization after finding that macOS virtualization solutions introduced stability and performance trade-offs.
- Colocating Mac minis in Malaysia closer to Git infrastructure reduced p50 app build times for the primary Grab codebase by roughly 40%.

**Tags:** [CI/CD](https://yomu.fyi/topic/ci-cd), [iOS](https://yomu.fyi/topic/ios), [Migrations](https://yomu.fyi/topic/migration), [Performance](https://yomu.fyi/topic/performance), [Scalability](https://yomu.fyi/topic/scalability)

[Read original post](https://engineering.grab.com/mac-cloud-exit)