What's Going ARM: Adopting ARM64 At Airbnb

The presentation discusses the process of implementing multi-architectures in Airbnb's infrastructure to improve price and performance.

• Focus on one or two workloads that have a business need for better price and performance
• Form a small pilot group with subject matter experts
• Upgrade and migrate operating system, languages, runtimes, and open source software
• Automate the process of building, uploading, and signing packages
• Invest in performance tooling and analysis

The speaker mentions that they had to upgrade their operating system to get arm64 support, and that some older operating systems like Ubuntu 1804 don't have robust support and will soon go out of support. They recommend selecting the latest operating system with up-to-date packages and arm64 support, and upgrading it instead of switching to a different distribution. They also automated the process of building and deploying packages with CI jobs, and added arm64 support one by one for packages where it was challenging to give support.

What’s going ARM? With all the recent developments in the architecture space, you may be wondering how these changes apply to your infrastructure. At Airbnb, we’re going through a multi-year journey to evaluate and adopt support for ARM64 and “multi-arch” support-- from our local laptop developer environments, to CI infrastructure, all the way through to production workloads. In this talk, we will go over: - An overview and evaluation of the current state of ARM - The pitfalls and challenges we faced - How we designed multi-arch support - And more!