Seamlessly migrated critical infrastructure to Arm with zero downtime or disruptions.
Reduced both compute costs and carbon emissions, helping the nonprofit align with sustainability goals while maintaining high performance.
End-to-end consistent environment on Arm that enhances productivity, test accuracy, and reliability across all stages of development.
Challenge 1: Growing Infrastructure Demands in A Global Ecosystem
As Python’s popularity surged, the Python Software Foundation (PSF) began to see strain on its infrastructure. Core systems, including PyPI (Python Package Index), documentation hubs, and internal services, faced longer build times, rising cloud costs, and increasing complexity. Supporting one of the world’s largest open source developer ecosystems required infrastructure that could scale to millions of active users.
Challenge 2: Cost Optimization and Sustainability Goals
As a small nonprofit with a limited engineering staff, the PSF needed a platform that was cost-effective, energy-efficient, and sustainable. At scale, Python.org serves 11 million monthly visitors, 24 million page views, and 188 million requests. Meeting these demands required infrastructure that could lower compute costs while reducing environmental impact. By modernizing on Arm-based AWS Graviton instances, the PSF achieved both efficiency and sustainability.
Challenge 3: Ensuring Developer Consistency Across Environments
Millions of Python developers were already coding daily on Arm-powered Apple M1 and M2 laptops, but their CI pipelines and production systems still ran on x86 architectures. This created friction, inconsistent test results, and unnecessary debugging. Aligning development, CI, and production on a unified Arm architecture became essential to improving the contributor experience.
Why AWS Gravition + GitHub Arm64 Runners
Migrating to Arm-based AWS Graviton instances provided the PSF a seamless, low-risk transition path. With Kubernetes orchestration, the move was as simple as switching instance types with zero downtime or disruption to the Python community.
With the introduction of GitHub’s native Arm64 runners, the PSF achieved end-to-end consistency across laptops, CI, and cloud environments. This opened the door for broader testing coverage across platforms for Linux and Windows on Arm runners.
Additionally, with support from Arm, the PSF leveraged 500 GB bare-metal machines for deep memory and stress testing. These high-capacity systems uncovered bugs that could never be reproduced on laptops, significantly improving Python’s reliability, performance, and quality assurance.
Migration Best Practices from the Python Software Foundation
- Confirm compatibility early: Validate critical workloads such as PyPI, CI/CD pipelines, and test suites before shifting production to ensure a seamless cutover.
- Leverage Kubernetes for orchestration: Treat instance type changes as routine operations by using container orchestration. Kubernetes made the PSF’s migration almost effortless.
- Adopt end-to-end consistency across architectures: Standardizing on Arm from developer laptops to CI pipelines to production reduced friction, shortened cycles, and improved contributor productivity.
Arm Cloud Migration is our developer initiative for companies of all sizes migrating to Arm architecture in the cloud. Explore the Arm Software Ecosystem Dashboard, network with the Arm community, or contact migration experts for migration support.
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