Webinar: https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/17792/588393?utm_source=ArmLtd&utm_medium=brighttalk&utm_campaign=588393 Multi-architecture infrastructures enable workloads to run on the best hardware for the task (Arm or x86) and optimize price/performance ratios while boosting design flexibility. However, migrating from a single- to a multi-arch framework can be tricky. Join me to learn about: - What is multi-architecture infrastructure? - The trend for moving cloud workloads to multi-arch - How early adopters handled the challenges - The growing software ecosystem of Arm - Comparing the price-performance of common workloads on x86 vs Arm - Resources to get you started This talk prepares developers for the road ahead with the ability to run workloads on the best hardware without needing to be concerned with the underlying architecture.

1. © 2022 Arm
Cheryl Hung, Sr Director of Ecosystem, Infrastructure
25 July 2023
Multi-Arch Cloud
Infrastructure from the
Ground Up
Why you should consider it and how to get
started

2. 2 © 2022 Arm
Agenda
This presentation is aimed at architects, engineering managers, DevOps and platform
engineers.
What is Multi-Arch Cloud Infrastructure?
• Use cases
Web server: NGINX on Alibaba Cloud
NoSQL data store: Redis on Alibaba Cloud
Machine learning on AWS Graviton3
• Case studies
FusionAuth
Honeycomb
How to get started
• Three steps to migrating to multi-arch
• Example deployments
Wordpress + MySQL on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) on Arm
Github Actions on Arm-based Burstable VMs on Azure

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About me
Cheryl.Hung@arm.com, Senior Director of Ecosystem, Infrastructure
My mission is to get Arm to cross the chasm
• SW support
• Open source
• HW availability
• Standards bodies
• Developer outreach
Previously engineer and eng manager at Google and Apple, and VP at Cloud Native
Computing Foundation

4. © 2022 Arm
What is Multi-Arch Cloud
Infrastructure?

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Cloud spending and energy usage are under pressure
EU goal of climate-neutral data centers by 2030
Companies need to maximize price-performance and use resources efficiently

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What is Multi-Arch Infrastructure?
Computer architectures are either RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computers) or
CISC (Complex Instruction Set Computers).
Arm’s RISC architecture targets power efficiency and performance, and can be
licensed for many use cases
• Mobile devices
• Automotive
• Internet of Things
• Cloud
The goal of Multi-Arch Infrastructure is to run workloads on the best hardware for
their price-performance needs, without developers needing to be concerned with
the underlying architecture

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What kind of workloads can benefit?
Machine learning
Distributed memory cache
Web servers
From the Arm Community Infrastructure Solutions Blog
Improve NGINX performance up to
32% by deploying on Alibaba Cloud
Yitian 710 instances
Improve Memcached performance
up to 41% with Alibaba Cloud Yitian
710 instances
AWS Graviton3 featuring Arm
Neoverse V1 is up to 1.8x faster
than x86 for deep learning
inference workloads

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What kind of workloads can benefit?
Broad support for Arm across the top used open source projects
Arm-based instances are available on every major public cloud provider
• AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle, Baidu Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud, JD Cloud
Lots of work to make it really easy to recompile your software for Arm (with a few
tweaks). We’ll look at two real life case studies.

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Summe
r 2020
Community
member
investigates
running on
Raspberry Pi
Load tests on
Graviton
Official support;
rolled out to SaaS
in June
Summe
r 2021
March
2022
>70% of SaaS
instances run on
Arm
March
2023
A developer-focused API-first auth provider deployable anywhere

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Technical timeline
1. Finding the JVM that supported ARM, especially Mac ARM chips (Java 17 was the first one
to do so). Added Java 17/ARM support to the code base Dec 2021 - Feb 2022
2. Updating and testing install scripts to use the correct JVM
3. Updating docker to target the ARM architecture with jlink and multi-arch builds
4. Checking for ARM support in public cloud regions when spinning up SaaS
5. Update the application to expose the underlying architecture
Performance testing and results
• Logins are especially CPU intensive due to password hashing, so the team load tested
50k logins. Arm handled 26-49% more logins per second and cost 8-10% less than Intel
on EC2

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“Because we run on Java, our lift was pretty small. We just
had to find a JVM built for ARM, and then work out any
remaining kinks”
- Daniel DeGroff, FusionAuth CTO
“I just switched a FusionAuth instance to arm64 and the
transition was so smooth I couldn't even tell whether it's
actually running the arm64 version”
- Hendy Irawan, FusionAuth user and BandungPermaculture.com
CIO

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Full stack observability enabling engineers to deeply understand and debug
production software
March
2020
First experiments
with Graviton2
Ingest workers in
production
Virtually all
workloads and
envs on Arm
92% of vCPUs on
Arm
May
2021
Nov
2021
Turned off last x86
EC2 instances
99% Arm on
Lambda
April
2022

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Technical timeline
1. Chose to migrate ingest workers first as they are stateless, performance critical and scales
out horizontally.
2. The ingest workers are written in Golang, so compiling for Arm was easy. They wer deployed
in dogfood environment and positive results observed.
3. Initially no Kubernetes or container orchestration, everything in Terraform and Chef so could
switch Arm Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) by enumerating all the dependencies to update.
4. Next up were own workloads (easiest to re-compile and highest compute spend) and Kafka.
The last were ad-hoc one-off services and those difficult to migrate. After one year of work,
the last x86 EC2 instance was turned off, and 99% was on AWS Lambda.
Testing and results
• Saved 40% of EC2 instance bill

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“Graviton has enabled Honeycomb to scale up our product without
increased operational toil, spend less on compute, and have a smaller
environmental footprint.”
- Ian Smith, Engineering Manager, Honeycomb.io
“I personally approached it as an idle experiment with a few spare
afternoons and was surprised by how compelling the results were.
Saving 40% on the EC2 instance bill for this service […] is well worth
the investment”
- Liz Fong Jones, Field CTO, Honeycomb.io
@oicheryl

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“48 of the top 50 Amazon EC2 customers
use AWS Graviton processors for their
workloads”
Danilo Poccia, Chief
Evangelist (EMEA) AWS, Aug
2022

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How to get started

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Lots to consider in a modern cloud native infrastructure!
• Infra As Code
• CI/CD, reproducible builds
• Packaging, binaries, images,
registries
• Testing, scheduling, rollout,
performance testing
• Infrastructure upgrades

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@oicheryl
Three steps to migrating to multi-arch

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Three steps to migrating to multi-arch
1. Inform 2. Optimize 3. Operate
i. Inventory your software
stack (OS, container
images, libraries,
frameworks, runtimes,
tools used to build, deploy
and test, and tools used to
monitor and manage)
ii. Identify hotspots and check
each for Arm support
(AArch64 in GCC, arm64 in
Linux kernel)
i. Provision your test Arm64
environment
ii. Upgrade container images
and test
iii. Performance testing
iv. Build K8s cluster
• Mixed control plane and
worker plane nodes
• Cluster creation
• Daemonsets
i. Update CI/CD for
reproducible Arm64 builds
ii. Canary or blue-green
deployment
• Node affinity, taints and
tolerations
• Different limits and
requests per architecture

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Example deployment 1: Deploy WordPress on K8s
Simple deployment on Arm-based instances on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
1. Use terraform to set the cluster to deploy Arm-based VMs:
2. Use the scripts in https://community.arm.com/arm-community-blogs/b/infrastructure-
solutions-blog/posts/aks-on-arm-based-ampere to deploy K8s, WordPress and MySQL

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Example deployment 2: Saving on CI/CD
1. Build apps with Github Actions on Arm-based Burstable VMs on Microsoft Azure

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Example deployment 2: Saving on CI/CD
2. Check burstable VM is accruing credits
3. Commit to CI/CD pipeline to use the accumulated credits

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Summary

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Summary
Cloud spending and energy usage are under pressure. Companies need to maximize
price-performance and use spend efficiently.
The goal of Multi-Arch Infrastructure is to run workloads on the best hardware for their
price-performance needs, without developers needing to be concerned with the
underlying architecture.
• Real life case studies show 25-40% savings and 20-60% performance increase compared to x86
Arm-based instances are available on all major public cloud providers and Arm is widely
supported across the software ecosystem, both open source and commercially.
To get started, use the Inform – Optimize – Operate model to find your hotspots and
manage the transition smoothly.
Check out the Arm Community Infrastructure Solutions Blog for tips and tricks.

25. © 2022 Arm
Cheryl Hung, Sr Director of Ecosystem, Infrastructure
25 July 2023
Thank you
Cheryl.Hung@arm.com