Posted on June 15, 2026 by Dave Neary, Director of Developer Relations at Ampere Computing

In recent years, Arm64 has been taking the cloud service provider world by storm. Recent reports indicate that, as of the end of 2025, over 50% of new instances on AWS and over 33% on Azure are running on Arm64 CPUs. Supporting Arm64 as a building block for modern cloud native computing is no longer optional; it is a requirement.

In late 2023, Oracle Cloud announced that it would be donating $3M in Arm64 compute resources, powered by Ampere Computing CPUs, to CNCF projects. With this donation, Oracle was setting up CNCF projects to embrace the reality of multi-architectural clouds, and improve Arm64 support across the cloud native ecosystem. This enables CNCF projects to easily develop, build, and test Arm64 releases and bring the architecture into parity with x86.

As the architecture has become widely adopted, most CNCF projects have ensured that their releases are compatible with Arm64 and have been building Arm64 containers and multi-arch container manifests in addition to x86. However, CI and test coverage can be spotty. Historically, the lack of availability of Arm64 build nodes and developer spaces has been a constraint. With this Oracle program, that is no longer an issue for CNCF projects. The CNCF Infra team has facilitated access to these resources for dozens of projects so far, enabling OCI instances to be used as GitHub Actions runners, development and testing environments for community members.

GitHub Actions runners on OCI Arm64 instances: what’s available and how projects are using it

For many projects, native Arm64 CI has historically been limited by the availability and performance of hosted runners. While GitHub’s hosted Arm64 runners have improved, their constrained capacity—especially in CPU count and memory—can be insufficient for larger build matrices, multi-arch containers, or performance validation.

That is exactly the gap the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) credits program aims to fill. The CNCF Infra team can help provision Arm64 instances of arbitrary size as self-hosted GitHub Actions runners, among other use cases. Projects that need more memory or more cores for longer-running CI tasks now have an option. 

To get started with credits, maintainers typically submit a CNCF Service Desk ticket that includes the intended use, which OCI services will be used, and a rough usage estimate. Because OCI credits are a shared community infrastructure resource, the CNCF Infra team applies reasonable guardrails to ensure long-term sustainability and fair access. They encourage limiting resource spend to under $5,000 USD/month initially, but exceptions can be made based on actual needs.

Usage of Arm credits across CNCF projects has grown rapidly. According to an Oracle developers blog from early 2025, as new projects were onboarded to OCI, credit usage “surpassed last year’s total usage in just two months,” and more than a dozen projects — including OpenTelemetry, Longhorn, Crossplane, and Jaeger — were already benefitting from this capacity at that point.

Native Arm64 CI has demonstrably improved project confidence and release quality for a number of projects in recent years. After participating in an initial pilot program to provide hosted Arm64 runners to CNCF projects, a number of CNCF project maintainers shared their insights:

“We’re very happy about the results. We see the performance on Arm is much higher than what we would get with legacy x86 servers. […] We are seeing a great uptake in terms of Arm64 downloads. […] I can say, without a doubt, I’m a convert.”— OpenTelemetry maintainer Antoine Toulmé

“Falco really needed Arm64 GitHub runners to elevate its support for the architecture and enlarge its user base.” Falco maintainer Federico Di Pierro

“[If the Arm CI breaks now] there’s no way we will merge that until we figure out why … we have full confidence now {in Arm64 as a target platform].” — containerd maintainer Phil Estes

Once you open a ticket requesting GitHub runners on OCI, the Infra team will give you access to existing OCI-hosted GitHub runners, and share how to specify the name of that runner for your actions workflows. For projects, it could not be easier to get started.

If you run into issues — whether during runner setup, workflow integration, or porting dependencies to Arm — the CNCF Infra team and wider community can help. Engage with the CNCF staff on Slack early – even if they don’t know how to help, they will know someone who does.

Arm64 support is quickly becoming table stakes for cloud-native projects. With OCI credits and CNCF Infra supp

ort, infrastructure barriers to reliable native CI are lower than ever, enabling maintainers to ship better software for all users.

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