Accelerate your builds with ARM-based pipelines

The ARM architecture is commonly used in mobile and IoT development, including Android and iOS operating systems. Being more energy-efficient, it proves one of valid sustainability improvements, allowing to reduce resource consumption on the green side, and save money on the budget side.

Adding ARM support means that developers can now fully reproduce their ARM-based workflows in Buddy, from unit tests to Docker container orchestration.

To enable the new runners, go to your pipeline settings and switch the CPU type:

Enabling ARM

ARM Docker builds

The new runners are especially useful in building ARM Docker images. In Buddy, you can perform this with the Multi-Arch Docker action. Until now, such builds were run on x86 servers using QEMU emulation. Now, they run on a dedicated ARM build server, as indicated in the action details:

Multi-Arch Docker Build action

Introducing this feature allowed us to reduce the build time of ARM images 11 (eleven!) times. The results below are actual results derived from our QA tests:

QEMU vs native ARM Docker image build times

Look forward to more exciting things in the upcoming months, including ARM self-hosted runners! 🫡