Replace Works on Arm machines affected by Equinix Metal sunset (June 2026)

[richardlau]

Refs: https://deploy.equinix.com/blog/sunsetting-equinix-metal/

As such, with this announcement, we’ll move towards an orderly sunsetting of Equinix Metal at the end of June 2026.

We're already in the (still ongoing) process of migrating all of our x64 hosts off Equinix Metal: https://github.com/nodejs/build/issues/3597

We'll need to find out if the sunset will also cover the ARM machines we have through the Works on ARM project.

[vielmetti]

Thanks @richardlau , noted. I'll share what I know specifically about Works on Arm at Equinix Metal when I know more.

[richardlau]

We have confirmation that this will affect the existing ARM resources currently hosted on Equinix Metal. I have sent an email to our contact at the Works on Arm program to ask if they have plans in place for affected projects such as ours (our testimonial is on https://www.arm.com/markets/computing-infrastructure/works-on-arm).

[richardlau]

I had an action item from the most recent Build WG meeting to resume the email discussion, which I've just done. I'm going to be out of office until after Easter, but the build WG email alias in on the thread in case we need to respond to anything while I am out.

[richardlau]

I haven't had a response to the email I sent on 10 April -- I've just sent a follow up in case it was missed.

[ryanaslett]

Update on this: We're currently in an email thread with some folks at ARM attempting to find a new home for these resources.

[richardlau]

We have a decommissioning date now:

Just wanted to bring to your kind notice that we will be decommissioning the server(s) currently assigned to you through the Works on Arm program by August 8, 2025.

[ryanaslett]

I have created two additional servers at azure in the OpenJS account. They are not as powerful as the altras, (8vcpu/16gb ram), but given the utilization we're seeing, they should probably still be able to perform.

There is an impending azure credit grant that is being clarified, but if that happens we may be able to have our ARM coverage very much supported by Azure.

I've ran the ansible for those two machines and have them in the rotation, but Im out the next four days so wont be able to get my ansible changes pushed up as a PR.

[ryanaslett]

The initial machines were too memory poor to perform well for the debug builds, and were OOMing.

I have added one more machine to the mix with 16 vcpu/64gb ram, with two containers on it to run the debug builds specifically.

It seems to be performing rather well (faster than the altras even), and I've removed the rest of the equinix machines from the rotation.

https://github.com/nodejs/build/pull/4131 contains the changes to add the azure machines. When that is merged we'll have a couple more tasks to wrap up the Arm machine replacement:

• [x] remove the equinix machines from jenkins
• [x] remove the equinix machine ip's from ci.nodejs.org's firewall
• [x] remove the equinix machines from ansible
• [ ] provide access to other buildWG members to be able to administer the resources we have running in the OpenJS foundation's Azure account.

[vielmetti]

Glad to see that the 16c/64G machine performs favorably. What hardware is that running on? We'll get questions about transition options from other projects.

[vielmetti]

And than you @ryanaslett and the team for being methodical and well-documented in your efforts, it's invaluable.

[ryanaslett]

Glad to see that the 16c/64G machine performs favorably. What hardware is that running on? We'll get questions about transition options from other projects.

The larger machine is an Azure Standard D16ps v6 VM, and the smaller ones were Standard D8pls v6.

Granted, I dont think we were utilizing the entirety of those Altra's (they were huge), so if others were hoping for something of that capability, Im not sure whether that would work for them or not.

[ryanaslett]

I'm going to say this is wrapped up.

One last follow up here: https://github.com/nodejs/build/issues/4133 and some open PR's (https://github.com/nodejs/build/pull/4132) to remove the equinix machine definitions and add the new azure machines (#4131 )

Thanks again @vielmetti for all the equinix support over the years. And thanks to the Works on ARM team for providing these resources for as long as we have.