Adopting ARM at Scale

Some time ago I wrote about infrastructure cost savings using Multi-Arch Images and the growing ARM-based competition between big cloud providers.

Interestingly, just last week, Uber published an article about their big migration from on-premise data centers to Oracle Cloud and Google Cloud platforms, integrating Arm-based servers for cost efficiency. The main challenge is to migrate existing infrastructure and around 5000 services on multi-arch approach.

Uber team defined the following migration steps:
- Host Readiness. Ensure that host-level software is compatible with Arm.
- Build Readiness. Update build systems to support multi-arch images.
- Platform Readiness. Deployment system changes.
- SKU Qualification. Assess hardware reliability and performance.
- Workload Readiness. Migrate code repositories and container images to support Arm.
- Adoption Readiness. Test workloads on Arm architecture.
- Adoption. The final rollout. The team built an additional safety mechanism that reverts back to x86 if a service is deployed with a single-architecture image.

The migration is not fully finished yet, but the first services are already successfully built, scheduled, and running on Arm-based hosts. Looks like a really good achievement in migrating huge infrastructure.
 
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