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Continuous CI/CD Momentum for Arm Architecture

Kushal Koolwal
October 6, 2020

Last October, at Arm TechCon 2019 we announced partnerships with five major CI/CD partners. In this blog, I am going to highlight the progress made towards creating a further robust CI/CD ecosystem for developers wanting to build and test software for Arm Neoverse infrastructure platforms.

Usage Model

When it comes to using CI/CD natively on Arm architecture there are two main options:

  • CI-as-a-Service – Developers simply point their open source project repositories with appropriate CI configuration file to run their CI pipelines on Arm servers hosted in the cloud.
  • Self-hosted – Developers setup the CI tool on their own Arm hardware to run the CI pipeline.

For CI-as-a-Service, Arm partnered with Drone.IO and Travis CI to enable it as a cloud service on Packet (An Equinix Company) through the Works on Arm program where developers can build and test their open source projects for free.

For self-hosted options, developers can use AWS CodeBuild, Azure Pipelines, GitHub Actions, GitLab, and Jenkins.

CI/CD Stats

Drone.IO and Travis CI both have seen a significant increase in developers building for Arm architecture. Within nine months of launching the service, Travis CI has seen more than half a million build jobs and close to 800 unique open source repositories building for Arm. Drone.IO is averaging 30K builds jobs per month up 33% from last year.

Graph: Arm64 builds on Drone Cloud

Graph: Arm64 builds on Travis CI

CI/CD Ecosystem Updates

Following are some of the key developments for Arm CI/CD Ecosystem since last October:

  • In Nov. 2019, AWS CodeBuild added support for Arm architecture allowing based applications. See this blog on how to use CodeBuild for Arm-based applications. 
  • In Dec. 2020, GitHub added support for GitHub Actions self-hosted runners for Arm architecture.
  • In May 2020, GitLab and Arm announced complete support for Arm64 self-hosted runners including binaries, RPM/DEB packages, and Docker Image.
  • In June 2020, Azure Pipelines introduced support for Arm64 architecture. Check out how the CNCF Envoy project enabled Arm64 CI environment using Azure Pipelines on AWS Graviton2.
  • In early Sept. 2020, Travis CI also announced its service on AWS Graviton2 providing developers with more options such as Full VM environment support which is required for projects such as DPDK and OvS.
  • In Sept. 2020, GitLab added official Omnibus Arm64 packages for Ubuntu and OpenSUSE in their latest release which allows developers to run GitLab instance itself on Arm64 hardware.
  • Finally, today I am excited to announce CircleCI as the newest member of the Arm CI/CD ecosystem. CircleCI is currently building support for Arm - make sure to sign-up at CircleCI’s interest form for the latest updates and for the opportunity to get early access to Arm on CircleCI.

Summary

In summary, CI/CD support is an important piece towards offering developers a frictionless environment to develop for Arm architecture. We invite all software developers to build and test for Arm architecture with their CI/CD tool of choice.

Do not forget to register for Arm DevSummit starting Oct 6th to see some of our CI/CD partners in action including CI/CD update in the Infrastructure line of business keynote session.

Visit Arm CI/CD Developer Site

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