Migrating applications to Arm-based architectures is increasingly common across cloud, data center, and edge environments. Arm-powered servers and instances, available from AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, Alibaba Cloud, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), offer significant performance-per-watt advantages and compelling cost efficiency.
However, porting workloads from one CPU architecture to another often requires more than simple recompilation. While many applications transition smoothly, others contain architecture-specific code or dependencies – originally developed for x86 – that can lead to build failures, runtime errors, or performance degradation on Arm systems.
Common challenges include issues with:
In large or legacy codebases, these issues are often buried in third-party libraries or auto-generated components, making manual inspection slow and unreliable.
To address these challenges, static code analysis tools play a critical role. Tools specifically designed for portability analysis enable developers to scan local codebases or remote repositories (such as GitHub) and pinpoint architecture-specific constructs before attempting compilation or deployment on Arm. By surfacing portability issues early in the development cycle, code scanning reduces time-to-first-build and helps prevent complex failures later on.
In this Learning Path, you’ll use migrate-ease, a tool that helps developers move beyond trial-and-error debugging when porting their code to Arm. It provides clear, actionable insights into potential portability issues by detecting problematic patterns across widely used programming languages. These insights - combined with targeted refactoring - accelerate the process of making code portable, maintainable, and production-ready on Arm.