Google Axion C4A is a family of Arm-based virtual machines powered by Google’s custom Axion processors, built on Arm Neoverse V2 cores. These instances deliver high performance with improved energy efficiency for modern cloud workloads, including CI/CD pipelines, microservices, GitOps workflows, and cloud-native applications.
The C4A series provides a production-ready Arm alternative to x86 VMs, enabling teams to evaluate performance, cost, and efficiency trade-offs on Google Cloud. For Kubernetes users, Axion C4A instances are well suited for running Arm-native GKE clusters and validating cloud-native tooling such as Argo CD on modern infrastructure.
To learn more about Google Axion, see the Google blog: Introducing Google Axion Processors, our new Arm-based CPUs .
Argo CD is a declarative, GitOps-based continuous delivery tool for Kubernetes. It continuously monitors application manifests stored in Git repositories and ensures that the live cluster state matches the desired state defined in Git.
Instead of manually applying manifests, Argo CD treats Git as the single source of truth. Any change committed to Git is automatically detected, synchronized, and enforced on the cluster. This model provides strong guarantees around consistency, traceability, and repeatability.
Argo CD runs natively on Kubernetes and is architecture-agnostic, making it fully compatible with Arm64-based GKE clusters running on Google Axion C4A. All core Argo CD components and common application images support linux/arm64, enabling fully native GitOps workflows on Arm infrastructure.
In this Learning Path, you’ll use Argo CD to:
For more information, see the official Argo CD documentation: https://argo-cd.readthedocs.io .
You now understand Google Axion C4A instances and their Arm-based architecture, as well as how Argo CD provides declarative GitOps workflows for Kubernetes. In the next section, you’ll provision a Google Axion C4A VM to serve as your deployment environment.