Google Axion C4A is a family of Arm-based virtual machines built on Google’s custom Axion CPU, which is based on Arm Neoverse-V2 cores. Designed to deliver high performance with improved energy efficiency, these virtual machines offer strong performance for modern cloud workloads such as CI/CD pipelines, microservices, media processing, and general-purpose applications.
The C4A series provides an Arm-based alternative to x86 virtual machines, enabling developers to evaluate cost, performance, and efficiency trade-offs in Google Cloud. For Kubernetes users, Axion C4A instances provide a practical way to run Arm-native clusters and validate tooling such as Helm on modern cloud infrastructure.
To learn more about Google Axion, see the Google blog Introducing Google Axion Processors, our new Arm-based CPUs .
Helm is the package manager for Kubernetes. It simplifies application deployment, upgrades, rollbacks, and lifecycle management by packaging Kubernetes resources into reusable charts.
Helm runs as a lightweight CLI that interacts directly with the Kubernetes API. Because it is architecture-agnostic, it works consistently across x86 and Arm64 clusters, including those running on Google Axion C4A instances.
In this Learning Path, you use Helm to deploy and manage applications on an Arm-based Kubernetes environment and verify common workflows such as install, upgrade, and uninstall operations.
For more information, see the Helm website .