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Comment by brenden2 | Hacker News Reader

I tried to use ARM instances on AWS, and I discovered a lot of things just don't work. For example, launching an EKS cluster with ARM nodes requires a bunch of hacks, and you can't really do anything useful with it yet. The instances are also not properly supported by Terraform.

I'm excited for ARM because of the pressure it will put on Intel, and also because of the cost savings. However it seems like AWS has a lot of work to do to make it useful.

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Without good support for at least the following:

    - docker
    - kubernetes
    - go
    - rust
    - python
    - node
    - .net core
    - java
    - C/C++

It won't catch on... Not being able to buy one of these systems also has the issue of platform developers coming up short in terms of adapting tooling for the above list.

A lot more of those things work than you might expect. I was able to get a very large node app working on their ARM instances very quickly... Docker support is also there from as far I know.

It supports all of the above.

In AWS there is one extra step to deploy it than an Intel cluster. And that's only because it is in preview.

I wasn't indicating that any of them didn't work... I frankly didn't know... Only pointing out the most widely used software platforms.

What's required for all these to be supported is just developers being able to buy 64-bit ARMv8 processors running a standard 64-bit Linux kernel, not necessarily the exact same processor Amazon has. And the Raspberry Pi 3B is an inexpensive 64-bit ARMv8 processor which can run a standard 64-bit Linux kernel. Sure, it's ARMv8.0 instead of ARMv8.2, but as mentioned in the article software compiled for ARMv8.0 works fine on ARMv8.2.

Okay, I wasn't aware of that... all the same, would be nice to be able to actually buy one to work against. The list of supported platforms and being able to develop (near-locally) are what are really needed.

Haven't really looked into it... it's on my todo list to look at cross-platform builds to target Raspberry Pi devices, will probably setup containerized cross platform builds for at least node, rust and .net core for my own use.

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