Introduction to DevOps with Ionic Cloud
Ionic Cloud makes mobile app delivery easy by providing powerful cloud services to help you build, publish, test, and update your apps in real time.
Development teams can focus completely on the unique features of their app and outsource the complicated app delivery process to Ionic Cloud. As a mobile DevOps platform, Ionic Cloud powers mobile CI/CD at companies like Burger King, AAA, BCBS, and more.
CI/CD enables teams to continuously test and integrate their apps—instead of performing these steps all at once before shipping— then automate the delivery of those apps. A staple in the backend—and more recently frontend—ecosystems, CI/CD services help developers perform a set of common tasks on every commit to their app, including:
- Running builds for every commit pushed to a git repo
- Running test suites, tracking failing and succeeding tests
- Performing webhooks and other actions after builds
- Launching or deploying apps to hosting destinations after successful builds
Ionic Cloud#
Build native iOS and Android binaries in the cloud without the headache of maintaining your own build servers.
Publish directly to the iOS App Store and Google Play Store, directly from your cloud dashboard.
Provide live updates and hotfixes to user devices instantly without going through the app stores.
Already have a CI/CD platform? Use Ionic's cloud products in your pipelines with our CLI.
Native Builds#
Generate iOS and Android apps without running, managing, and updating Mac infrastructure.
Native Builds makes your iOS and Android binaries from scratch with every upload. Reduce configuration, troubleshooting, and collaboration time by building with your code as the source of truth, on fresh hardware, every time you make a modification.
Native Builds offers over a dozen build stacks running on Mac and Linux hardware, giving you greater control over your iOS and Android cloud build environments while unlocking better native build stability and easier troubleshooting.
No need to maintain your own build infrastructure—Native Builds takes care of it for you.
Native Builds even ports the entire build output directly to your CI/CD server so it acts like it’s running on your own hardware.
Deploy to App Stores#
App Store Publishing allows you to automate the entire app delivery and release process: from building a native binary to publishing on the app stores and updating apps over time.
Just input a few basic data points, and we’ll take care of the rest. No Mac hardware is required, since iOS apps are built in our secure cloud environment.
When a new app version is checked in, the iOS and Android binaries are sent directly to TestFlight, the iOS App Store, Google Play, and Google Play Beta for testing or production.
Secure Live Updates#
Update your app in real time to improve user experience and protect your bottom line.
Unlock the superpower of immediate deployments. Ship live app updates, critical bug fixes, content changes, beta features, and more as soon as they’re built.
This feature is unique to Web Native applications and allows your team to send live code changes directly to users and testers without submitting new native updates to the app stores.
Developers can make changes to JavaScript, HTML, CSS, images, and other web files and these changes are fully compliant with Apple and Android requirements.
Live Updates works seamlessly in the background, checking for the latest app updates and automatically upgrading to newer versions. Unless there’s a change to the native code, no user action is required to keep your apps updated.
Cloud CLI & CI/CD Integrations#
If your organization already uses a CI/CD platform (like Azure DevOps, GitLab CI/CD, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Travis, or CircleCI), you can continue to utilize that system for all of your DevOps orchestration while still receiving all of the benefits of Ionic Cloud's features.
Your DevOps, QA, and development teams can continue to collaborate using their existing processes while reducing the management burden of a cross platform mobile CI/CD setup.
We’ve found that large organizations—with or without existing DevOps teams—can unlock true iteration and save countless headaches and hundreds of maintenance and development hours per year by adopting Ionic Cloud in this way