Well, for me it's a way to learn how to squeeze more performance from a codebase, and a healthy reminder that not everything on the planet runs on x64 machines.

Having to port stuff to a different architecture (or even having to rebuild tools/packages you'd ordinarily have on x64 but not on ARM) is a sobering experience.

Anyway, the Oracle JDK (1.8) runs speedily enough on these, and you can run ElasticSearch or Hazelcast just fine -- and focus on optimising things.

Like the quote goes, "if you want to write fast software, do it on a slow computer"