Is Multi-architecture kubernetes possible in colima?

[artur-jablonski]

I start colima like this:

colima start --cpu 4 --memory 16 --arch aarch64 --vm-type=vz --vz-rosetta --network-address --kubernetes

Now I can run both linux/arm64 and linux/amd64 architecture docker containers:

~  docker run --platform linux/amd64 --rm busybox:latest  echo -n "life is good"                                                                 Mon Feb  9 15:24:17 2026
Unable to find image 'busybox:latest' locally
latest: Pulling from library/busybox
61dfb50712f5: Pull complete
Digest: sha256:b3255e7dfbcd10cb367af0d409747d511aeb66dfac98cf30e97e87e4207dd76f
Status: Downloaded newer image for busybox:latest
life is good⏎
 ~  docker inspect busybox:latest | grep Architecture                                                                                      5.5s  Mon Feb  9 15:24:57 2026
        "Architecture": "amd64",
 ~                                                                                                                                                Mon Feb  9 15:25:08 2026
 ~  docker image rm busybox:latest                                                                                                                Mon Feb  9 15:25:10 2026
Untagged: busybox:latest
Deleted: sha256:b3255e7dfbcd10cb367af0d409747d511aeb66dfac98cf30e97e87e4207dd76f
 ~  docker run --platform linux/arm64 --rm busybox:latest  echo -n "life is good"                                                                 Mon Feb  9 15:25:14 2026
Unable to find image 'busybox:latest' locally
latest: Pulling from library/busybox
b85757a5ca1a: Pull complete
Digest: sha256:b3255e7dfbcd10cb367af0d409747d511aeb66dfac98cf30e97e87e4207dd76f
Status: Downloaded newer image for busybox:latest
life is good⏎
 ~  docker inspect busybox:latest | grep Architecture                                                                                    4011ms  Mon Feb  9 15:25:26 2026
        "Architecture": "arm64",

I am trying to achieve the same with the kubernetes cluster provisioned inside colima by using the --kubernetes switch.

However it seems that the architecture of the k8s cluster is set to be linux/arm64

~  k get nodes                                                                                                                           212ms  Mon Feb  9 15:29:01 2026
NAME     STATUS   ROLES                  AGE     VERSION
colima   Ready    control-plane,master   2d21h   v1.33.4+k3s1
 ~  k describe node colima | grep -i architecture                                                                                                 Mon Feb  9 15:29:04 2026
  Architecture:               arm64

And now pods that reference images that have `arm64 builds work, but the ones that only have amd64 fail during image pull:

spec.containers{ibmmq}: Failed to pull image "ibmcom/mq:latest": Error response from daemon: no matching manifest for linux/arm64/v8 in the manifest list entries: no match for platform in manifest: not found

What options do I have to run a mix of amd64 and arm64 pods in the cluster provisioned in colima?

is there anything like docker's --platform in k8s to force particular platform for a pod?

can the same k8s node handle multiple architectures?

if not is it possible to provision the kubernetes cluster with two nodes each handling different achitecture and then let the control plane to handle scheduling on appropriate node? How would I go about that.

[mg1986jp]

Multi-architecture Kubernetes in Colima isn't directly supported in a single instance. Colima starts a single VM with one architecture, and the k8s cluster runs inside that VM.

With your command using --arch aarch64 --vz-rosetta, you're running an ARM64 VM with Rosetta translation for x86 binaries. This means:

• ARM64 container images run natively
• x86_64 container images run through Rosetta (with a performance penalty)

So in a sense, you can already run multi-arch images — the scheduler will pull whatever arch the image is available for, and x86 images will run via Rosetta.

What you can't do is run actual x86 nodes alongside ARM nodes in the same cluster (like you would in a real multi-arch cluster). For that, you'd need something like running two separate VMs and joining them as nodes, which Colima doesn't support.

For local development and testing multi-arch workloads, the single ARM VM with Rosetta approach should work fine for most cases.