Multi-Architecture Google Cloud Builds on arm64 VMs

As an engineer, I lean heavily on answers other engineers give at sites like dev.to or via blog posts. I like to return the favor when I can.

I just published a Medium article on a series of lessons I learned about building so-called "multi-architecture" Docker images with docker buildx.

This stems from the prevalence of Apple's new M1 / M2 chips. I got a new Mac laptop when I started my job in June. Practically none of our Docker images were available for arm64.

My article shows lessons learned getting to multi-architecture images, including using an arm64 VM on Google Cloud Build to speed up the arm64 half of the builds (as shown in this image):

There is also a companion git repo with full source code.

Hopefully it can be of use to someone else!