ARM Support Arrives in Concourse CI: A Long-Awaited Milestone

Concourse CI now officially supports ARM architecture. You can run Concourse on Raspberry Pis, Apple Silicon Macs, and ARM-based cloud servers.

At CentralCI, we’ve been trialing this for months, helping the Concourse developers test and validate changes.

The Journey to ARM

Years ago, Ciro from Pivotal pioneered early experiments running Concourse on a Raspberry Pi. The community maintained a fork specifically for building ARM versions. The breakthrough came as the container ecosystem matured - with Docker’s multi-platform builds and more workloads migrating to ARM, official support became viable. We no longer needed to manually build ARM workers from scratch.

What We Built

Supporting ARM required a comprehensive overhaul:

• 12 base resource-types migrated to Chainguard Wolfi base images (the previous base lacked ARM variants)
• Enhanced tooling with updates to the OCI Build task and Registry Image resource for multi-platform workflows
• Pipeline updates across our entire build, test, and release infrastructure

What This Means for You

• Local development on M-series Macs runs natively without emulation overhead
• Edge deployments on Raspberry Pis and other ARM devices become practical
• Cloud costs drop 20-40% using ARM instances
• Smaller images mean faster pulls, less storage, reduced bandwidth

What This Means for CentralCI

We’re enabling ARM support across all our clusters and launching new subscription plans with reduced costs.

During our trial period, we ran ARM workers alongside x86 infrastructure. We’ve seen up to 35% cost savings on compute resources while maintaining equivalent performance for most workloads.

Rolling Out ARM Support

• Phase 1 (Complete): Beta ARM web/workers in US-West region
• Phase 2 (October 2025): ARM across all North American clusters
• Phase 3 (Q4 2025): Global availability including EU regions

Existing customers can opt-in to ARM workers through their dashboard settings.

New Pricing Tiers Coming

We’re introducing ARM-optimized subscription plans in October that pass infrastructure savings directly to you.

Questions about ARM support or want early access? Reach out to our support team or chat on Discord.