Linaro announces ARM Based Developer Cloud

Linaro has established two Developer Cloud facilities, one based in Cambridge, UK and the second based in Austin, Texas. Over time the Developer Cloud will expand through participating Linaro member and member partner data-centres providing cloud regions in China, North America and Europe.

“Linaro works with its members to provide reference open source software to accelerate the development of innovative applications taking advantage of ARM based platforms”, said George Grey, CEO of Linaro. “As the adoption of ARM based servers accelerates and IoT applications rapidly evolve, software developers need access to hardware and easy to use software reference platforms. The Linaro Developer Cloud is designed to broaden the availability of the latest hardware to developers globally, and to enable commercial and private cloud providers to utilise the implementation to accelerate deployment of their own offerings. Linaro will publish the end to end open source code for the implementation of the Developer Cloud”.

The Developer Cloud is the combination of ARM based silicon vendors’ server hardware platforms, emerging cloud technologies and many Linaro member driven projects, including server class boot architecture, kernel and virtualisation. These projects have been under development since the formation of the Linaro Enterprise Group (LEG) and Linaro has already been enabling key developers via remote access to bare metal ARM servers for the last year.

The Developer Cloud is based on OpenStack, leveraging both Debian and CentOS, as the underlying cloud OS infrastructure. It will use ARM based server platforms from Linaro members AMD, Cavium, Huawei and Qualcomm Technologies and will expand with demand, and as new server platforms come to market. These platforms will include both single socket and dual socket configurations as well as 10/40Gb networking, scalable storage and integrated accelerators that ARM SOC partners are bringing to market.

Access to the Developer Cloud will be provided via the linaro.cloud web portal. Through the portal, developers can request cloud access and may report bugs and performance issues. The portal will also provide a developer forum to share development and porting knowledge, as well as best practices for ARM servers.

“AMD has been working closely with Linaro and its members to make available a complete software stack for installations like the Linaro Developer Cloud for AMD’s ARM based server processors” said Suresh Gopalakrishnan, Corporate Vice President, Enterprise Solutions Engineering at AMD. “The Opteron A1100 processor is built with these workloads in mind. We are providing the necessary support so the Opteron A1100 is readily available in the Linaro Developer Cloud and in a range of commercially available systems.”

“Linaro’s reference software platform already gives developers easy access to open source project contributions that advance highly efficient ARM technologies across a variety of markets,” said Jeff Underhill, Director of Server Programs at ARM. “The Linaro Developer Cloud builds on this with a rich new development environment supporting a range of applications but it’s particularly exciting to see the immediate value this will bring to the growing ARM-based server ecosystem.”

“Data Centre customers are continuing to drive demand for ARMv8 server solutions and the requirements for optimised software and applications are growing dramatically, said Larry Wikelius, Vice President Software Ecosystem and Solutions Group, Cavium. “Cavium has partnered with OVH to deliver a Public Cloud solution based on ThunderX, Cavium’s ARMv8 Workload Optimised Processor. We are pleased to be part of the Linaro Developer Cloud, which we expect would accelerate development of optimised software on ARMv8 servers and enhance services offered by the Cloud providers and enterprises.”

“Qualcomm Technologies is pleased to be supporting the Linaro Developer Cloud,” says Elsie Wahlig, principal engineer, Datacentre Group, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. “As the software ecosystem for ARM servers gains momentum, the Developer Cloud presents a new vehicle for friction-less access to standards-based hardware and software to enable accelerated development by our software partners and open source community participants.”

“Since the founding of the Linaro Enterprise Group in 2012, Red Hat has been at the forefront in developing key open standards for the ARM ecosystem, and our active participation through the Fedora and CentOS communities as well as the Red Hat ARM Partner Early Access Program has helped to extend the reach of cloud computing to encompass ARM architecture” said Jon Masters, chief ARM architect, Red Hat. “We are pleased to see the availability of Linaro Developer Cloud and look forward to additional innovation streams that it will enable.”