AWS Graviton: The Great Arm Migration

AWS Graviton: The Great Arm Migration

Author: Bret Fisher June 28, 2024 Duration: 39:16

Bret and Nirmal are joined by Michael Fischer of AWS to discuss why we should use Graviton, their arm64 compute with AWS-designed CPUs.

🙌 The Agentic DevOps Guild has launched! It's a training + community + mentorship program for engineers wanting to learn the latest CI/CD automation and dive into Agentic DevOps. Meetups are happening now, with new course videos dropping every few weeks. Join the Guild and become your team's leader in AI for infrastructure automation https://www.bretfisher.com/theguild 🍾

Graviton is AWS' term for their custom ARM-based EC2 instances. We now have all major clouds offering an ARM-based option for their server instances, but AWS was first, way back in 2018. Fast forward 6 years and AWS is releasing their 4th generation Graviton instances, and they deliver all the CPU, networking, memory and storage performance that you'd expect from their x86 instances and beyond.

I'm a big fan of ARM-based servers and the price points that AWS gives us. They have been my default EC2 instance type for years now, and I recommend it for all projects I'm working on with companies.

We get into the history of Graviton, how easy it is to build and deploy containers and Kubernetes clusters that have Graviton and even two different platform types in the same cluster. We also cover how to build multi-platform images using Docker BuildKit.

Watch the video version on YouTube. Includes demos.

★Topics★
Graviton + GitLab + EKS
Porting Advisor for Graviton
Graviton Getting Started

Creators & Guests

  • (00:00) - Intro
  • (06:19) - AWS and ARM64: Evolution to Graviton 4
  • (07:55) - AWS EC2 Nitro: Why and How?
  • (11:53) - Nitro and Graviton's Evolution
  • (18:35) - What Can't Run on Graviton?
  • (23:15) - Moving Your Workloads to Graviton
  • (27:19) - K8s Tooling and Multi-Platform Images
  • (37:07) - Tips for Getting Started with Graviton

You can also support this podcast by subscribing to my YouTube channel and my weekly newsletter at bret.news!

Grab the best coupons for my Docker and Kubernetes courses.
Join my cloud native DevOps community on Discord.
Grab some merch at Bret's Loot Box
Homepage bretfisher.com


Bret Fisher hosts DevOps and Docker Talk: Cloud Native Interviews and Tooling alongside Nirmal Mehta, pulling conversations directly from their live audience sessions. This isn't a theoretical lecture series; it's grounded in the practical, often messy realities of building and running modern systems. Each episode digs into the specific tools and philosophies shaping infrastructure today, from the foundational elements like Docker and container orchestration with Kubernetes or Swarm to the broader cultural shifts of DevOps, SRE, and platform engineering. You'll hear discussions that span the entire software lifecycle, touching on the integration of security with DevSecOps, the automation promises of GitOps, and what "Cloud Native" truly means for development teams. The dialogue stays focused on actionable insights and real-world use cases, offering a genuine sense of what works and what doesn't in the field. For anyone navigating the container and cloud ecosystem, this podcast serves as a regular, insightful check-in with practitioners and experts, hosted by someone deeply embedded in the community. The natural, interview-driven format makes complex topics accessible, ensuring listeners come away with more than just buzzwords-they get context and clarity.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 100

DevOps and Docker Talk: Cloud Native Interviews and Tooling
Podcast Episodes
Tailscale Everything [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 55:06
Bret is joined by Alex Kretzschmar to talk about Tailscale, a universal VPN that connects teams, devices, and development environments for easy access to remote resources.🙌 The Agentic DevOps Guild has launched! It's a t…
Dockerfiles have versions? [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 16:06
I break down why Dockerfile frontends exist and how Docker's build engine "BuildKit" is giving us updated Dockerfile features.🙌 The Agentic DevOps Guild has launched! It's a training + community + mentorship program for…
Dagger: CI of the Future? [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 57:48
Application delivery doesn’t have to suck. Bret and Nirmal are joined by Solomon Hykes, the founder or Docker, to talk about Dagger and their application delivery-as-code that runs anywhere.💥 This episode is brought to y…
Registry is getting an upgrade: Inside OCI artifacts [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 21:13
The OCI specifications for registry and image are getting a minor version number update to 1.1 soon, and this could be a big deal for anyone storing artifacts other than images somewhere in their infrastructure. This epi…
KubeCon Live with Friends 2023 [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 50:10
Bret is joined by Nirmal and a host of friends from the floor of KubeCon, to talk about the latest news and goings-on.🙌 The Agentic DevOps Guild has launched! It's a training + community + mentorship program for engineer…
Moving Domain Registrars, Again [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 8:11
In this short episode, I tell the tale of my registrar DNS name hosting for the last 25 years and what I prefer for a cheap and reliable name registrar.🙌 The Agentic DevOps Guild has launched! It's a training + community…
Multipass Local Virtual Machines [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 31:44
Bret and Nirmal are joined by Chris Townsend, the engineering manager for Canonical's Multipass team, to discuss how to use Multipass as the easiest local virtual machine for Docker, Kubernetes and more!🙌 The Agentic Dev…
DockerCon 2023 New Features and Tools! [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 16:23
After returning from DockerCon earlier this month (Oct 2023), Bret recorded this podcast where he breaks down all the product announcements and details from the event. We hope you enjoy it and share it with your friends…
NetBackup for Kubernetes [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 49:50
Bret is joined by Demetrius Malbrough and Joseph D'angelo from Veritas, the company that makes NetBackup amongst many other data protection tools.NetBackup has been around at least 25 years and I've been using it over 20…
AWS Lambda Containers [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 49:02
Bret and Nirmal are joined by Ken Collins, AWS Serverless Hero and Principal Engineer at Custom Ink to discuss all things Lambda and to dig into the details of running containers in serverless.🙌 The Agentic DevOps Guild…