An Initiative to Streamline Software Development on Arm with Free Cloud Resources
The Works on Arm initiative enables developers to build, test, and optimize projects on the Arm64 architecture by providing free-of-cost access to Arm based developer platforms, cloud instances, and CI/CD environments. Arm has partnered with cloud platform providers to make Neoverse-based compute available for cloud-to-edge solutions, while offering choice and flexibility.
Developer Offerings:
The GitHub Arm-based hosted runners, seamlessly integrated with GitHub Actions, empower native application development and testing on Arm Neoverse platforms. Preloaded with essential tools and a cloud developer image, these versatile runners efficiently support diverse Linux and Windows application development across cloud, edge, and automotive use cases.
Microsoft Azure cloud platform consists of more than 200 products and cloud services designed to help you bring new solutions to life — to solve today’s challenges and create the future. Build, run, and manage applications across multiple clouds, on-premises, and at the edge, with the tools and frameworks of your choice.
Empowering Software Development with Works on Arm Initiative
Works on Arm is a strategic initiative to enable and accelerate the software ecosystem for Arm64. Here are some of the software, libraries and tools that successfully leveraged the resources from Works on Arm.
Works on Arm Testimonials
AWS
AWS Graviton processors, based on Arm Neoverse 64-bit cores, are designed by AWS to deliver the best price performance for your cloud workloads running in Amazon EC2.
AWS Graviton3 processors are the latest in the AWS Graviton processor family. They provide up to 25% better compute performance, up to 2x higher floating-point performance, and up to 2x faster cryptographic workload performance compared to AWS Graviton2 processors.
All new and existing AWS customers can try the t4g.micro instances free until December 31, 2022. During the free-trial period, developers who run a t4g.micro instance will automatically get 750 hours per month deducted from their monthly bill.
Equinix
Arm and Equinix have a long-standing partnership to make powerful Armv8 bare metal infrastructure — including latest generation of Ampere systems — available to the open-source software ecosystem to build, test, and optimize for Arm64 architecture. The Ampere Altra are available in single socket (80 cores, 256GB RAM, 1TB NVMe U.2 SSD) and dual socket (160 cores, 512GB RAM, 2TB NVMe U.2 SSD) configurations where Ampere eMags are available in a single socket (32 cores, 128GB RAM, 480GB SSD) configuration.
Equinix, as part of the Work on Arm initiative, provides free access to state-of-the-art computing resources for software developers, supporting a wide variety of projects with a special focus on building systems, languages, and cloud native applications. A common use case for these resources is for public CI and setting up self-hosted runners. The on-demand infrastructure resource is managed by Equinix Metal as part of its commitment to the Arm ecosystem.
Google Cloud
Powered by Ampere® Altra® Arm-based processors, Google Cloud VMs deliver exceptional single-threaded performance at a compelling price. VMs come in multiple predefined VM shapes, with up to 48 vCPUs per VM, and 4GB of memory per vCPU. They offer up to 32 Gbps networking bandwidth and a wide range of network-attached storage options, making Google Cloud VMs ideal for scale-out workloads, including web servers, containerized microservices, data-logging processing, media transcoding, and large-scale Java applications.
Microsoft Azure
Run the apps your customers want on Azure Virtual Machines featuring Ampere® Altra® Arm-based processors. Develop and deploy a variety of workloads such as web and application servers, open-source databases, Java and .Net applications, gaming, and media servers, and more.
Engineered to efficiently run scale-out cloud-native workloads, the Dps v5 and Dpls v5 VM series offer excellent price-performance. Additionally, memory optimized Eps v5 VM series are designed to meet the requirements of memory-intensive workloads such as open-source databases, in-memory caching applications, and data analytics engines. All the Arm-based Azure VMs can be included in Kubernetes clusters managed using Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).
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miniNodes
miniNodes provides thought leadership and ecosystem building by exploring topics such as clustered computing on small form-factor Arm devices, building the world’s first IoT, edge, and cloud proof-of-concept running entirely on Arm platforms, demonstrating the energy efficiency of Arm Servers, and advocating for standards to help ease the burden of booting Arm devices.
In addition, miniNodes has built and maintained a small hosting infrastructure for several years that provides low-cost, low-power Arm devices on a public IPv4 internet connection for developers and enthusiasts to run small servers. Primarily consisting of Raspberry Pis and Nvidia Jetson Nanos, this public-facing service has allowed miniNodes to engage with the community, gather feedback from Arm developers, and help improve the developer experience.
OSL (Open Source Lab)
The nonprofit Oregon State University Open Source Lab (OSUOSL) is accelerating the growth of key open source software projects by distributing software globally to millions of users, thus promoting the culture of open source and increasing developer productivity.
OSL provides Ampere Computing’s Arm Neoverse-based eMAG servers to develop and test open source software for the Arm64 architecture. The cluster is based on an Open Stack environment and offers Arm64 instances running on KVM, accessible via OpenStack’s GUI and API interface. These Arm64 server resources are ready and open to the developer community upon request.
Oracle
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is a platform of cloud services that enable developers to build and run a wide range of applications in a highly available, consistently high-performance environment. OCI is designed to help companies run their entire application portfolio in the cloud, especially mission-critical workloads.
The Ampere A1 Compute platform brings additional diversity and choice to cloud computing and in partnership with Ampere Computing, the Altra Arm processors are available on OCI. Oracle is the only cloud provider offering Arm-based compute instances at only one cent per core hour with flexible sizing from 1 to 80 OCPUs and 1 to 64 GB of memory per core. The Ampere A1 compute platform provides deterministic performance, linear scalability, and a secure architecture with excellent price-performance.
Tencent
Tencent cloud's first new instance of Arm architecture is powered with Ampere Altra processors, with a frequency of 2.8GHz, and is based on the high-performance Arm Neoverse N1 cores. Fully applicable to container applications, websites, test development and other general computing scenarios. Arm cloud servers will play its special architectural advantages in Android native scenarios such as cloud mobile phones, Android simulation tests, and embedded development to meet more application scenarios. Tencent's self-developed Tencent Kona JDK provides Java runtime support for new instances, has passed complete functional testing, and users can choose to run Java applications in Kota JKK 8 or 11.