Buildkite & ARM Revisited

Last month, Apple's new M1 Macs and ARM-based Graviton EC2 instances were discussed in relation to their performance. Buildkite has been working on ensuring compatibility with ARM environments, starting last July and releasing M1 binaries in December. Homebrew users can install the appropriate binary for their CPU automatically. The Elastic CI Stack for AWS is a template that allows users to create a private, autoscaling cluster of Buildkite agents on Amazon EC2 instances. It provides guidance on AWS best practices and enables automatic adjustment of build capacity based on current needs. Agent tags can be used to control which pipelines target specific agents, allowing for better management of ARM environments.