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.