Down to the metal

Operating infrastructure at scale, for companies at scale, is something we always aspired to reach. It would mean we could make our software fully open source, and that matters even more with coding agents around, because the effort of replicating, writing, and running someone else's software in your own infrastructure keeps going down. That doesn't mean every company will write and run their own software, or deploy open source technologies, but a good chunk will, and we want our business to be safe when they do.

This is something we imagined would happen a bit later. That has changed, and we are going to deploy our own hardware in a data center ourselves, starting with Mac minis. Before this decision, we believed we could focus on a higher layer and rent hardware from other providers who would give us a good service at a good price. That hasn't been true in the case of Mac hardware. What we experienced was unresponsiveness and a lack of transparency when it came to reaching long-term agreements, and worse than that, rental costs that amortize the price of a Mac in less than half a year. It wasn't viable financially, so we had no choice but to go down this path. At the same time, our current users and customers showed interest in our runner offering, and we expect more projects and companies in the Apple ecosystem, an ecosystem we've invested in for many, many years, to follow a similar path. We'll work hard to ensure that what they get surpasses what they've seen out there, one step at a time. All of that put pressure on us, which prompted us to look into what such a move would entail.

I don't think it's an easy problem to solve, and it's definitely not something you want to run if your company's business is not renting infrastructure, but it's not an impossible project either. We'll have a lot to learn, and once we figure it out, we'll have a good foundation, not only to package it as runners, but also for a handful of other ideas we have around how the industry could leverage compute. When we did the numbers, the finances of compute turned out to be very attractive from a business perspective, because it has the properties any business hopes for.

So here we go. Remember what the CLI used to be? Things have changed a lot. Marek ordered the first pieces, we are getting an initial batch of hardware together, and we are in the process of finding the data center. Exciting times for Tuist.