There’s been numerous announcements about Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) adding Arm-based Compute to the list of Virtual Machine (VM) Shapes. Check some of the announcements (here) and (here).
You can also watch it (here) too with Clay Magouyrk, Executive Vice President, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Note: The link above has more content and videos.
Have you seen the OCI Arcade? We have built the architecture deployable on OCI Always Free Tier.
Recently in the OCI Always Free Tier, an additional services has been added to include 4 cores and 24 GB of RAM of Ampere A1 Compute. With this additional capacity, it made sense for OCI Arcade to be ported to this A1 Compute Shape. Here is what we did and why.
The main reason in doing this work was to take advantage of the A1 Compute Shapes having up to 24 GB of RAM. In the original design, we built the stack using the E2.1.Micro Compute Shapes that provided a fixed 1 GB of RAM. This is why a second VM was used to deploy Kafka or Coherence-CE components (not both at the same time) and using Docker Swarm to simplify the networking. With the A1 Compute Shape, the stack can be consolidated into a single VM – meaning less configuration and less complexity. It also means there are more cores for other potential workloads – all on Always Free Tier.
What I’ve done is updated the current OCI Arcade repositories with a new branch called kafka-arm64. To use and see the changes, check out:
This is what the architecture looks like in comparison:
If you are going to use Oracle Resource Manager (ORM) to provision the stack like from this blog (here), there are a couple of things to consider.
- Select the VM.Standard.A1.Flex Compute Shape. Note: I’ve hardcoded the Shape to be 1 OCPU and 6 GB of RAM however the A1.Flex Shape can vary in OCPUs and RAM. I just haven’t included it in the Terraform script.
- Select the Compute Image with the aarch64 architecture. Note: You won’t be able to boot if you choose an x86 Shape.
And that is pretty much it. There’s something that I needed to do differently in regards to provisioning the components, which I’ll cover soon. If you are curious about what these differences are, you can compare the kafka and kafka-arm64 branches in the repositories.
If you need an environment to try this out or to have a game or two – head to the following link and sign-up. https://www.oracle.com/au/cloud/free/
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