Oracle on Tuesday launched a cloud computing service powered by data centre chips from Ampere Computing based on technology from Arm, the second major cloud company to offer an Arm-based service after Amazon’s Amazon Web Services.

Cloud providers are some of the biggest buyers of chips because they rent out the computing power they generate to thousands of other companies. Until recently, however, almost all the chips cloud services bought came from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices because most business software is written to run on those processors.

That began to change in 2018 when Amazon, the largest cloud provider, announced a service using its own custom chip made with intellectual property from Arm, the British firm whose technology already underlies most smartphone chips and is steadily making its way into laptops and data centers to challenge Intel and AMD.

Oracle on Tuesday joined the fray with chips from Ampere Computing, the company founded by former Intel President Renee James, who also sits on the board of Oracle. Oracle said it would rent out the chips at 1 cent per computing core per hour, less than half of what it said were its rivals’ comparable rates.

“We’re at an inflection point in the industry,” Clay Magouyrk, executive vice president of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, told Reuters in an interview. “Now that there’s a very competitive Arm product, I view my job as to offer my customers value and choice.”

Oracle also announced a range of initiatives to help expand the amount of business software that runs on Arm chips, a move that could help its rivals. Microsoft and Alphabet’s Google do not yet offer Arm-based cloud services to the public, but Magouyrk said he expects they will – and that all cloud customers will eventually benefit from the competition.

“We’ll be ahead of them in that regard, but I also think they’ll have Arm offerings and they’ll be highly competitive. I view this is a multi-year process where Arm becomes ubiquitous on the server,” Magouyrk said.

Microsoft is reportedly designing Arm-based chips for Azure servers and some Surface PCs, signaling the computer giant’s increasing willingness to lower its reliance on Intel.

Bloomberg reported Friday that the Redmond, Wash.-based company is working on in-house processor designs for its own servers that run Azure, mirroring an effort by Amazon Web Services, which has already began offering cloud instances using its own Arm-based server CPUs, Graviton.

The news organization, which cited unnamed sources familiar with the plans, said Microsoft is also exploring its own chip designs for some Surface PCs, which already include models with chips co-designed with Qualcomm and AMD separately.

In a statement to CRN, Frank Shaw, corporate vice president of communications at Microsoft, confirmed that the company is investing in its own chip design capabilities.

Because silicon is a foundational building block for technology, we’re continuing to invest in our own capabilities in areas like design, manufacturing and tools, while also fostering and strengthening partnerships with a wide range of chip providers,” he said.

Intel did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Arm, which licenses chip designs to companies that make their own processors, has been making a bigger push into the data center over the past few years with its Neoverse platform. In September, the company revealed its V1 and N2 core designs, both of which Arm said significantly outperform CPUs made by Intel and AMD while also having high energy efficiency.

“The emergence of Arm in the data center is being powered by many factors: customization, efficiency, ecosystem diversity, but all of that builds on top of performance,” Chris Bergey, senior vice president and general manager of Arm’s infrastructure business, said in September. “If Neoverse wasn’t delivering a significant measurable value proposition you would not see the market adoption and momentum that we are achieving.”

But Arm has also been finding more success with client computers in recent times, most notably with Apple’s Arm-based M1 processor, which is now available in a few Mac models. Apple has said that the M1 can outperform competing processors by up to two times.

Adding to the intrigue is the fact that Nvidia, a semiconductor company that primarily makes GPUs but is also starting to built its own server systems, is in the process of acquiring Arm from its current owner, SoftBank, for US$40 billion.

The Problem: Jira as a Graveyard

Atlassian’s Statuspage team had a bug-tracking workflow that looked reasonable on paper but broke down in practice as the team grew. Bug reports moved from customer support to an escalation engineer (EE), who would either fix a data issue directly or hand it to a developer. Simple problems got solved; complex ones got filed in Jira — and stayed there.

As Senior Development Team Lead Andrew Burleson described it:

“‘Put it in Jira’ became code for ‘forget about it’, and since putting things in Jira didn’t feel valuable, people often didn’t bother, so a lot of good ideas or observations weren’t getting captured.”

— Andrew Burleson, Atlassian

The knock-on effects were significant:

• Customer support had to chase developers to get responses back to customers.
• Response times were unpredictable and inconsistent.
• Ad-hoc, peer-to-peer bug assignments interrupted mainline feature work.
• A growing backlog of unresolved issues created ongoing customer experience debt.

Three Principles to Rethink Support

Rather than simply adding more process on top of a broken system, the team established three foundational principles to guide their redesign:

1. Communication beats speed. Not every bug can be fixed immediately, but timely, honest communication to customers throughout the resolution process is acceptable — and appreciated.
2. Throttle the interrupt work. The flow of unexpected bugs and high-priority requests is unpredictable, but manageable. By understanding the long-term rate of incoming tickets and resolving them at the same rate or slightly faster, the backlog stops growing.
3. Filter the noise ruthlessly. Much of the existing backlog was already resolved, no longer relevant, or out of scope for the product’s direction. Removing that noise made the real workload visible — and manageable.

The Gamification Fix: Poker Chips and Weekly Taxes

With sound principles in place, the team needed a mechanism that was simple, fair, and — crucially — engaging. Their solution was a gamified token economy built around physical poker chips.

How the System Works

• Each developer starts with two poker chips.
• Completing an “Overhead” ticket (a bug or support issue from the backlog) earns the developer additional chips.
• Every week, a tax is collected — typically one chip per developer.
• The tax rate is adjusted up or down to ensure the Overhead backlog drains at a controlled pace.
• Developers who have accumulated chips in reserve can pay the tax from their stockpile, buying themselves a week free from overhead work during crunch periods.
• Lighter weeks become an opportunity to tackle more overhead work and rebuild the stockpile.

Burleson explained the intent behind the design:

“By empowering developers to control their own schedules, we actually get more mainline and overhead work done, with less need for micro-management.”

— Andrew Burleson, Atlassian

Results: Fewer Forgotten Bugs, Happier Customers

After adopting the Overhead process, the Statuspage team reported several concrete improvements:

• The bug backlog was brought under control without derailing feature development.
• Issues are now triaged, assigned, and resolved at a regular, predictable cadence.
• More bugs — including higher-priority ones — are being fixed faster.
• Customer support no longer needs to babysit developers; every issue reaches a resolution and can be closed with the customer.
• Customers receive timely updates and realistic expectations, improving satisfaction even when a fix takes time.

“We’ve battle-tested it for several years, and now we’re happy to share it with other teams in hopes that others can benefit as much as we have.”

— Andrew Burleson, Atlassian

Key Takeaways for Engineering Teams

Atlassian’s approach offers practical lessons that apply beyond their specific toolset:

• Visibility matters more than volume. A backlog no one trusts is worse than no backlog at all. Auditing and pruning stale tickets is a legitimate, high-value engineering activity.
• Flow rate beats heroics. Sustainable bug resolution at a consistent pace outperforms occasional sprints of firefighting followed by long silences.
• Developer autonomy improves throughput. Giving engineers control over when they absorb interrupt work — rather than mandating it week-to-week — reduces resentment and increases actual output.
• Gamification works best when it is transparent and fair. The poker chip model is simple enough to understand immediately and gives every developer the same starting point and the same rules.
• Support and engineering alignment is a product quality issue. When customer support can reliably close the loop with customers, trust in the product improves independently of the bug fix rate.

Teams looking to replicate this approach do not need Statuspage or any specific Atlassian tool — the underlying principles of throttled intake, transparent prioritisation, and token-based developer autonomy can be adapted to any issue tracker or support workflow.