Migrating Core Business to Alibaba Cloud Yitian ARM Instances: Practices, Performance, and Cost Optimization

On May 16, Alibaba Cloud, Pingtouge, and Arm held a technical salon in Shanghai where experts explained the advantages of the Arm-based Yitian architecture and shared best‑practice cases of the g8y instance on big data and video workloads.

Li Kewei, an operations expert from Qianxun, presented the migration of Qianxun’s core location services to Yitian ECS instances, describing the motivations (cost reduction and efficiency), the preparation steps (OS, CICD, monitoring), and the need to recompile C++ code while Java runs unchanged.

The talk covered performance testing results, showing C++ workloads achieving over 50% speedup on ARM compared with x86, while pure Java workloads had slightly lower CPU utilization on ARM. It also explained why OpenJDK was adopted to obtain G1 GC support, reducing latency to around 200 ms.

Operational observations such as differences in Linux scheduler time‑slice behavior between x86 (1 ms) and ARM (4 ms) were discussed, along with a code example that triggered warnings under GCC 10, emphasizing the importance of handling compiler warnings to avoid crashes or OOM.

Migration strategy was based on cost‑per‑instance ranking, prioritizing high‑spending services, and a phased rollout with gray‑scale migration, ensuring CICD and monitoring systems support both architectures during the transition.

Cost analysis showed Yitian instances costing about 30‑40% less than comparable x86 instances while delivering 1.46× performance for C++ workloads and a modest 15% improvement for Java workloads, resulting in an overall 30%+ cost saving.

Future plans include migrating remaining core services, Kubernetes workers, and moving MySQL workloads to Yitian‑based RDS, while leveraging the migration experience for external projects.