Have you ever thought about introducing ARM-based machines? I’ve recently had great experiences with ARM-based machines on AWS and saw a great increase in performance while having lower costs.
Has this ever been considered on fly.io? Is the problem that fly.io has it’s own hardware and the hardware is currently amd64 only and it would require quite a big investment in hardware to introduce arm?
I came on here to ask the exact same question!
We think about it quite a lot! It’s going to take years, though. The two biggest consumers of ARM built their own chipsets. As a result, the market for independent ARM chips is not very healthy. Last time we tried to order ARM servers the manufacturer went out of business before they shipped them.
Do you want ARM for more reasons than just cost savings?
Honestly just cost savings.
Our roadmap had us moving to graviton instances on AWS before we found fly.
I’m interested in using Fly Machines to run ARM compilation jobs. Fly Machines seems very well suited to this usecase, but I already have a workstation for x86_64 compilation. Being able to quickly spin up an microVM for ARMv7/ARM64 compilations would be great, and I can’t find another service that offers anything similar.
(Non-cross-compiler ARMv7 builds with an ARM64 kernel currently require a kernel patch from Ubuntu. Hopefully that’s eventually upstreamed in some form.)