Container runtimes like Docker and containerd are the core software components that enable the adoption of container technology, whether in cloud orchestrator systems like Kubernetes or in edge and embedded compute scenarios. Similarly, the Open Container Initiative (OCI) has standardized the concepts around containers, like the image and runtime specifications, so that all runtime implementations are interoperable.

In both these worlds, the adoption of multi-platform support has made steady progress for the last 6-8 years. While progress has been slow at times, the ecosystem has now fully unlocked the advantages of ARM64 as one of the key platforms supported directly by runtimes and encoded into the specifications of the OCI.

In this talk we'll walk through this history of the adoption of ARM64, including a focus on the CNCF containerd project as a shining example of the adoption of multi-platform support, and specifically the enablement of the containerd project to build, test, and release official support on ARM64. We'll look at example use cases and where the industry is using this support today to enable production workloads on ARM64.