The transition to Apple Silicon (the M1, M2 ARM-based CPUs) has been great for macOS fans in many ways, but it’s added some friction when you want to run containers locally for testing or development. The good news is we’ve got you covered with ARM64 container images for Percona Server for MongoDB 6.
While it’s possible to run x86_64 images on an ARM-based Mac, it’s not the most efficient or performant way to do so. Unfortunately, this has been the only way to do so until now.
With the release of Percona Server for MongoDB 6.0.4, we’ve added native Docker container images for ARM64. These run without needing Rosetta 2 translation or emulation on your ARM-based Macs.
Running the ARM64 MongoDB container image on your Mac
If you have Docker or Docker Desktop installed on your Mac, you can run Percona Server for MongoDB with a one-liner as described in our documentation:
1 2 | $ docker run -d --name psmdb --restart always percona/percona-server-mongodb:6.0.4-3-arm64 |
Note that you’ll want to replace 6.0.4-3-arm64 with the appropriate image tag. You can check Docker Hub to find the current Arm64 version.
Prefer working with Podman? Just replace docker with podman:
1 2 | $ podman run -d --name psmdb --restart always percona/percona-server-mongodb:6.0.4-3-arm64 |
If you’re using Podman Desktop, you can just drop into the terminal to start testing your container with mongosh:
Figure 1: Podman Desktop running ARM64 MongoDB containers
This gives you a quick way to access the MongoDB instance inside the container. Or you can connect by running mongosh externally and connecting to the MongoDB port exposed by the container. You’ll find more documentation on docs.percona.com, “Run Percona Server for MongoDB in a Docker container.”
Figure 2: Using mongosh inside the Percona ARM64 container
Please put Percona Server for MongoDB ARM container images through their paces! We’d love to know if you encounter any problems or if you have any tips to share!
Graviton and other ARM platforms
You should also be able to run the Percona Server for MongoDB ARM container images on AWS Graviton instances and other ARM64 platforms. We haven’t done extensive testing there, but we expect these images to work unmodified on Raspberry Pi. If you encounter any issues, please let us know in the forums or file a bug in Jira.
What’s next for ARM64 builds and Percona Server for MongoDB?
This is the first step we are taking to address the ARM support needs. We have started with Docker for Percona Server for MongoDB, but of course we plan to expand the rest of the software for MongoDB and packages.
We aim to incrementally provide full support for the ARM64 architecture for the full Percona Distribution for MongoDB. We are also looking into Arm needs for other Percona products!
Percona Server for MongoDB is a source-available, enterprise-grade drop-in replacement for MongoDB Community Edition.
Learn more about Percona Server for MongoDB
