Managing Macs at Google Scale

Clay Caviness, Google LLC Part of XW18

Google has one of the largest managed fleets of Macintosh computers in the world. Macintosh Operations is the internal team tasked with developing these tools and managing these machines globally. With nearly a hundred thousand assets to manage and an ever-changing security landscape, we have had to develop many of our own tools to effectively maintain our fleet and keep our end-users safe and productive. This session will discuss the tools we’ve developed, tools from the open-source community, and commercial tools we use to manage and maintain the fleet.

Technical fields: Large fleet management, configuration management, software deployment, imaging, MDM, security.

Intended audience: Macintosh system administrators looking for methods of managing that will scale with growth.


Clay has been a Mac and UNIX systems engineer since the early 90s and was thrilled when NeXT bought Apple. He has worked in advertising and technology companies since 1996. Clay is currently working at Google a Site Reliability Engineer in New York City, on the team managing a global fleet of tens of thousands of Macs.