Build multi-architecture container images using GitLab

Code once, build for multiple architectures automatically using GitLab CI

By Deepak C Shetty, Sebastien Chabrolles
Published March 7, 2023

In this tutorial, we will use GitLab to create a small CI pipeline which will create container images of our sample application for ppc64le (IBM Power) and x86 (Intel) hardware architectures concurrently and push the images to the Quay.io container registry. Because container images are hardware (HW) specific, we need one image per HW architecture. This causes issues while automating and/or sharing images because we need to know the HW architecture beforehand in order to pick/serve the right image for our application to be deployed successfully across different Red Hat OpenShift clusters.

This tutorial shows you how to solve the multi-architecture multi-image problem by creating container manifests that will automatically serve the right container image based on the OpenShift cluster’s HW architecture. This ensures we need to deal with only one container image across OpenShift clusters of different HW architectures.