In recent years, Arm64 has rapidly gained traction among cloud service providers. By the end of 2025, more than half of all new instances on AWS and over a third on Azure were running on Arm64 processors. Today, supporting Arm64 as a foundational element of modern cloud-native computing isn’t just beneficial—it’s essential.
In late 2023, Oracle Cloud committed to donating $3 million worth of Arm64 compute resources—powered by Ampere Computing CPUs—to CNCF projects. This initiative was designed to help CNCF projects adapt to the growing reality of multi-architecture cloud environments and strengthen Arm64 support throughout the cloud-native ecosystem. As a result, these projects can now seamlessly develop, build, and test Arm64 releases, bringing the architecture to feature parity with x86.
As Arm64 adoption has surged, most CNCF projects have ensured their releases are compatible with the architecture and have begun producing Arm64 containers and multi-architecture container manifests alongside their x86 counterparts. However, continuous integration (CI) and test coverage remain inconsistent. Historically, limited access to Arm64 build nodes and developer environments has been a major bottleneck. Thanks to Oracle’s program, this is no longer a barrier for CNCF projects. The CNCF Infra team has already helped dozens of projects gain access to these resources, enabling them to use OCI instances as GitHub Actions runners and as development and testing environments for community contributors.
GitHub Actions Runners on OCI Arm64 Instances: Availability and Project Use Cases
For many projects, native Arm64 CI has long been constrained by the availability and performance of hosted runners. While GitHub’s own Arm64 runners have seen improvements, their limited capacity—particularly in CPU count and memory—often falls short for complex build matrices, multi-architecture container builds, or performance testing.
This is precisely the challenge the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) credits program addresses. The CNCF Infra team can assist in provisioning Arm64 instances of any size as self-hosted GitHub Actions runners, among other applications. Projects requiring additional memory or CPU cores for extended CI tasks now have a viable solution.
To request credits, maintainers typically open a CNCF Service Desk ticket detailing the intended use, which OCI services will be utilized, and an estimated usage level. Since OCI credits represent a shared community resource, the CNCF Infra team implements reasonable safeguards to ensure sustainable and fair access. They recommend keeping monthly spending under $5,000 USD initially, though exceptions are considered based on demonstrated need.
Demand for Arm credits among CNCF projects has grown quickly. According to an Oracle developers blog from early 2025, as new projects joined the OCI program, credit consumption “exceeded the previous year’s total in just two months.” At that time, more than a dozen projects—including OpenTelemetry, Longhorn, Crossplane, and Jaeger—were already leveraging this capacity.
Native Arm64 CI has significantly boosted project confidence and release quality across several initiatives in recent years. Following an initial pilot offering hosted Arm64 runners to CNCF projects, multiple maintainers shared their experiences:
“We’re thrilled with the results. Arm performance far exceeds what we saw on older x86 servers. […] We’re seeing strong growth in Arm64 downloads. […] I can confidently say, I’m now a believer.” — Antoine Toulmé, OpenTelemetry maintainer
“Falco urgently needed Arm64 GitHub runners to enhance its support for the architecture and expand its user base.” — Federico Di Pierro, Falco maintainer
“[If the Arm CI fails now], we won’t merge anything until we understand why… We now have full confidence in Arm64 as a target platform.” — Phil Estes, containerd maintainer
Once you submit a ticket requesting GitHub runners on OCI, the Infra team will grant access to existing OCI-hosted runners and provide instructions on how to reference them in your Actions workflows. For projects, getting started couldn’t be simpler.
If you encounter challenges—whether during runner setup, workflow integration, or porting dependencies to Arm—the CNCF Infra team and broader community are ready to assist. Reach out to CNCF staff on Slack early; even if they can’t solve the issue directly, they’ll connect you with someone who can.
Arm64 support is rapidly becoming a baseline expectation for cloud-native projects. With OCI credits and CNCF Infra support, the infrastructure hurdles to reliable native CI have never been lower—empowering maintainers to deliver higher-quality software for all users.
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