Introducing OpenShift on Arm

Arm has arrived

I am sure you have all heard the buzz going around about Arm^TM based systems: the systems from Apple, the offerings at AWS, the servers we see already coming to market; there is a lot happening. In addition to the buzz, the advances in this area are fantastic to see, matching great performance with low power consumption opens lots of opportunities. These systems really are going to be everywhere, in the data center, in the cloud, right out to the Edge; Telco, Finance, Manufacturing are all taking a close look at this revolution. This is the year that Arm will see major adoption. To paraphrase The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy “Arm is going to be big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is”.

Choice to run where you want

We all know that different workloads have different needs, run better on some architectures than others and even have different requirements based on where they will be located. We also know that some of those workloads will be running on Arm. At Red Hat OpenShift, we always want to give our customers the choice to run their workloads and applications on the best, most appropriate infrastructure, so it is with great pleasure that we are announcing the General Availability of OpenShift on Arm.

What can I do with OpenShift and Arm

With this release we will let you run on the latest AWS Arm based instances as well as those bare metal servers you are about to or already have bought. You can see all the pieces we have enabled in the table below. In addition, close to when OpenShift 4.10 became available, you will be able to manage OpenShift Arm clusters with Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes.

Supported hardware

For those of you looking at hardware, while we recommend using the certified systems on the Red Hat Certified Hardware list, the great news is that you will have loads of choice as we will also be allowing you to get support on systems that have met the Arm SystemReady/ServerReady specification. Now, whatever architecture best suits your needs, you can run OpenShift on top if it.

OpenShift on Arm tomorrow

This is only the start of our plans for OpenShift on Arm, in the coming releases you will see more and more of the add on features that run on x86 also being available for OpenShift on Arm. But don’t forget, for those of you ready to rock and roll with Arm today, you can do that with a fully supported OpenShift offering.

Try OpenShift on Arm today

All that is left is to try it, whether it is in an AWS environment or on those racked up systems in your datacenter, wander on over to cloud.redhat.com and give OpenShift on Arm a try. Let us know how you get on - there are exciting times ahead.