For my most recent project[1], I wanted to see if Amazon’s Graviton instances would be a good choice for my docker deployments (I was deploying MongoDB, an Express server, and several instances of the Janus WebRTC server). I was developing in Pop OS on an x86_64 desktop (since we’re gonna have to start specifying now) and found the toolchain around building ARM64 images to be pretty simple once I got it set up.

I benchmarked some `t2a.nano`s against some `a1.medium`s and found that the `nano`s were sufficient for my needs, so I went with them (they are cheaper than `a1.medium`s, even if the `a1`s have a better price-to-performance ratio).

I didn’t find it too difficult to rebuild any of these projects for cross-architecture usage. Even Janus, which has a TON of C/C++ dependencies (some of which have to be compiled from a particular version of the source) easily built for ARM with no change in the Dockerfile.

So I kind of feel like OP is exaggerating the effort required to migrate servers to ARM. Sure it might be a hassle when you have tons of microservices, but you can move them incrementally, and most things recompile with no changes. And regardless of what architecture your dev machine is, you’ll want to be able to compile for and work with both architectures if you want to get the most out of the infrastructure on offer in 2020.

[1] Shameless plug: https://chrisuehlinger.com/blog/2020/06/16/unshattering-the-...