In our dynamic economy, market agility is more important than ever. If you’re developing infrastructure solutions, your window of opportunity is short, and you need to make the most of it.
The ARM ecosystem wants to make it easier for its partners, and developers who desire to leverage the innovation of ARM-based solutions, to work together to gain a competitive edge. So, we’re introducing the ARM Infrastructure Developer Community (AIDC). This online resource is part of a broader collaboration designed to help you realize the value and innovation of the ARM ecosystem, and assist you in your efforts to get your solutions to market quickly.
Whether you're a seasoned developer or partner, or are just getting started working with ARM, the AIDC portal offers valuable resources to help you connect with peers, get informed, and jump-start project development.
The AIDC portal was designed to be a true one-stop shop, providing all the information needed about the hardware, software, the most appropriate chips, and the networking stacks to go with them. It also offers system integration help for developers looking to try their solutions out on ARM.
For example, suppose a developer wants to build a Virtual EPC-based solution, and is seeking options available to do it. They can start by accessing the solution directory on the AIDC portal to see who has done a proof of concept (PoC) for a vEPC. Browsing through the directory, the developer identifies a vendor who offers a 3GPP-compliant vEPC software product supported a couple of ARM SoCs with the horsepower, accelerators, and other elements that they will need to move forward.
Next, they will want to find out where to acquire a server with the chip from the vendor they’ve identified. Browsing the portal’s resource section, they find an ODM distributor that offers several different models of the server equipped with the chip they need, in the form factor they desire.
After identifying the chip and server they need, the developer needs an OPNFV virtualization platform to run the vEPC. Looking under the developer resources section of the AIDC portal, the partner finds a link to the OPNFV Wiki, where they can browse the latest releases to find an ARM image for the latest OPNFV platform release, which will run on the chip they’ve selected. They will also find a vendor who is offering commercial technical support and custom integration services for the platform and is experienced working with the chosen server. Perfect!
After an email exchange and a subsequent Skype call with the expert system integrator, the developer’s team books time on the OPNFV Pharos open cluster while they wait for the servers they’ve ordered, pulls down the correct ARM image, which boots and runs perfectly on the server cluster. Now they’re ready to drop their network function into it, and deploy and test the solution. If they run into any issues, they now know who to call to help get up and running fast and can replicate it on their own cluster when they get it set up.
Using the resources on the AIDC portal, developers have access to the resources and experts they need, and gets to market faster. There’s no need to visit numerous sites and manually search for individual elements.
The AIDC portal was not only designed to provide valuable development resource to the broad data center and network cloud infrastructure community, but to act as an open directory of information and knowledge about the partner ecosystem. We’ve started with a core set of solution providers, but will be adding more stakeholders from the ARM ecosystem on an ongoing basis.
Our developer ecosystem is a diverse community, with every partner bringing their own specific strengths and perspectives. But one thing they share in common is a focus on building innovative ARM infrastructure solutions.
The AIDC portal provides a high-level overview of what each partner does and what type of strengths they have. It helps you decide how and where you want to get started—and helps provide the basic building blocks and expert assistance you need to move forward.
The AIDC program aims to not only showcase our partner ecosystem, but to contribute to its development. In the future, our portal partners will increasingly collaborate in key open source communities, as well as coordinated reference platforms and PoCs to help strengthen this fast-growing community.
We’ve designed the AIDC portal to be an indispensable resource to assist your development efforts. Our portal is continually evolving and growing, and we’re looking forward to sharing additional details about new features and capabilities in the coming weeks.
Visit AIDC to learn more
If you have comments or questions, please contact AIDCAdmin@arm.com for more information.