ARM Support

Okteto supports installation on ARM-based Kubernetes clusters for Self-Hosted deployments. Running Okteto on ARM lets developers build and test against the same architecture as their target operational clusters, avoiding compatibility differences that can surface when developing on a different architecture than the one that runs the application.

Support Status

Cloud Provider	Recommended Instance	Status
Google GKE	Tau T2A (t2a-standard-4)	GA
Amazon EKS	Graviton 2/3 (m7g.xlarge)	Beta

ARM support is covered by the same release pipeline as x86. All control plane images are published as multi-arch (amd64 + arm64).

note

ARM support is available for Self-Hosted deployments only. Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) deployments are not supported.

Requirements

• Fresh installations only. Migrating an existing x86 cluster to ARM is not supported. ARM clusters must be provisioned from scratch.
• Homogeneous clusters. All nodes in the cluster must be ARM-based. Mixed architecture clusters (ARM + x86 nodes) are not supported.

Google GKE (GA)

ARM support on GCP using Tau T2A instances is generally available. Automated tests run against ARM clusters on GCP for every release and in weekly scheduled runs.

Cluster Configuration

We recommend creating a GKE cluster using Tau T2A nodes. The recommended instance type is t2a-standard-4:

gcloud container clusters create CLUSTER_NAME \
  --zone ZONE \
  --machine-type=t2a-standard-4 \
  --num-nodes=3 \
  --disk-size=250

note

Tau T2A instances are only available in certain GCP regions and zones. See the GCP documentation for regional availability.

Helm Configuration

GKE automatically applies kubernetes.io/arch=arm64:NoSchedule taints to ARM nodes. You must add the following tolerations to your config.yaml so that Okteto components can be scheduled on those nodes:

globals:
  tolerations:
    okteto:
      - key: "kubernetes.io/arch"
        operator: "Equal"
        value: "arm64"
        effect: "NoSchedule"
    dev:
      - key: "kubernetes.io/arch"
        operator: "Equal"
        value: "arm64"
        effect: "NoSchedule"
ingress-nginx:
  controller:
    tolerations:
      - key: "kubernetes.io/arch"
        operator: "Equal"
        value: "arm64"
        effect: "NoSchedule"
okteto-nginx:
  controller:
    tolerations:
      - key: "kubernetes.io/arch"
        operator: "Equal"
        value: "arm64"
        effect: "NoSchedule"
reloader:
  reloader:
    deployment:
      tolerations:
        - key: "kubernetes.io/arch"
          operator: "Equal"
          value: "arm64"
          effect: "NoSchedule"

For the full installation walkthrough, follow the GKE installation guide.

Amazon EKS (Beta)

Beta

ARM support on Amazon EKS is in Beta. The functionality is complete, but automated test coverage on EKS ARM is still maturing — validation is performed manually when introducing support for new Kubernetes versions. Until coverage matures, running this on operational clusters carries a higher chance of encountering an unexpected issue.

AWS Graviton 2 and Graviton 3 instances are supported. The recommended instance type is m7g.xlarge, which is equivalent in size to the standard m5.xlarge used in the default EKS guide.

Cluster Configuration

eksctl create cluster -f - <<EOF
apiVersion: eksctl.io/v1alpha5
kind: ClusterConfig

metadata:
  name: ${CLUSTER_NAME}
  region: ${AWS_REGION}
  version: "${K8S_VERSION}"

autoModeConfig:
  enabled: false

iam:
  withOIDC: true

nodeGroups:
  - name: ng-1
    instanceType: m7g.xlarge
    desiredCapacity: 3
    volumeSize: 250
    volumeType: gp3
    amiFamily: AmazonLinux2023
EOF

Helm Configuration

EKS does not apply architecture taints to Graviton nodes, so no additional tolerations are required for ARM scheduling.

For the full installation walkthrough, follow the Amazon EKS installation guide.

Dependencies

The following dependencies bundled in the Okteto Helm chart have been validated for ARM compatibility:

• Reloader
• Redis
• ingress-nginx

warning

ARM compatibility of these dependencies must be re-verified before bumping their versions. Check the relevant project release notes for architecture support before upgrading.

Limitations

The following scenarios are not supported in the current release:

Scenario	Notes
Migration from x86 clusters	No migration tooling; fresh install required
Mixed architecture clusters	All nodes must be the same architecture
BYOC deployments	Not supported
Azure AKS ARM	Not supported
GCP Axion (C4A) instances	Not supported
Oracle Ampere A1/A2	Not supported
Bare metal ARM	Not supported
Divert	Not supported on ARM (planned for a future release)
GPU workloads	The supported ARM instance types (Tau T2A, Graviton 2/3) do not offer GPUs
Windows containers	Not supported on ARM
WebAssembly (WASM) runtime	Not supported on ARM