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ARM is gaining traction...

As you may know, for a lot of technical and commercial reasons, ARM is gaining a lot of market-share. AWS now provides ARM servers, HP started shipping ARM servers, and others are expected to follow. I work in a company that provides hosting and professional services to some big web applications. Therefore ARM is something I am looking at.

...but is it really production-ready ?

Our production teams are not against it but think that most packages are not yet available for ARM. If it was true, I think it is not the case anymore. I was able to find all the packages our teams use on Debian on the official repo, meaning ARM Linux should be qualified for production.

But number of packages is not quality. How ready is Linux ARM for professionnal web applications as of today ? Did you heard or participate in an ARM project ?

Some informations

AWS claims it's easy and fast

AWS claims that Datadog, Hashicorp, Netflix, Snapchat, SmugMug and others migrated to Graviton2 (the in-house ARM). It is difficult to know exactly how they use it, for which workload and if it is relevant for SMBs.

OS are almost all compatible

Debian, RHEL, Suse, Ubuntu... all of them now provide an ARM distribution. MacOS (with the M1 chip) and Windows (with it is already available distro and the incoming new Surface) are also ready.

Linus Torvalds claims it will never be mainstream for servers

For him, ARM servers are unstable, slow and expensive. No one has any interest to use it (cloud providers & developers). It was in the beginning of 2019.

Clément Duveau
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    This doesn't address your question, but HP has been selling ARM-based "Moonshot" servers for a number of years. Not sure how successfully, but they are not really new. Evidence e.g. https://www.itcandor.com/hp-moonshot-arm/. – berndbausch Jan 20 '21 at 12:04
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    If old, but respectful researcher says something is possible, it is likely true. If old, but respected researcher says something is impossible, he is likely wrong. Just don't expect Linus to be right all the time. There are much interest in ARM in the server market; there are even supercomputers where all computing power comes solely from ARM processors (Fugaku by Fujitsu; google a64fx for more) – Nikita Kipriyanov Jan 20 '21 at 13:42
  • @NikitaKipriyanov I don't agree with Linus Torvalds. I just stated him as it is an opposite point of view. – Clément Duveau Jan 21 '21 at 14:07

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Short answer: ARM seems ready. There is multiple workloads running on ARM thanks to AWS (as it is the biggest provider), Android devices, and Raspberry.

For PHP, Python, Java, and others interpreted languages, little to no changes are necessary to make an application run. Some configs can be done to enhance performance on ARM but it should be fully functionnal out of the box

Compiled languages can be tricky. For most of programs, re-compile with the right parameters is enough, but sometimes, it can be painful... It really depends on what your application do and how it communicate with the hardware.

Most packages are available (mysql, php, varnish, redis,...) it doesn't mean that everything is available and optimized, but in web-hosting scenarios (from the simplest to major websites) everything is available.

I personnally think that other cloud provider will offer ARM, or that Intel / AMD will change drastically their price/policy/model to compete.

Clément Duveau
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