The end of year is always busy with conferences and 2020 is no different, despite current restrictions, we are still able to meet virtually and engage with the community. Arm hosted its first virtual developer summit in October - https://devsummit.arm.com/ - with this year’s focus placed on cloud native, standardization, and edge computing. The adoption of cloud native technology has seen an impressive growth over the past few years, which reflects the growing attendance we see at the Cloud Native Foundation (CNCF) events.
To better support this activity, Arm launched project Cassini in 2019 as an initiative to help accelerate deployment of cloud native applications across Arm platforms. An update on these activities can be found in this Cassini blog which was published during our last developer summit.
Arm will be a sponsor at KubeCon NA conference, November 17-20. There are several projects and initiatives that Arm and partners have been working on that are covered during the conference.
Companies are increasingly adopting cloud native technologies and practices, building distributed applications using micro-service and orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes. Main motivation includes agility, scalability, performance, and maintainability where deployments range from cloud platforms to Edge / IoT. Security is an important consideration when developing projects, requiring hardware and software support to ensure computation and handling of data are done securely.
Arm contributed the PARSEC project to the CNCF (currently in incubation). The project provides an abstraction of security services and operations and enables a secure multi-tenant environment in edge devices. We published a blog about the project as it entered CNCF sandbox stage earlier this year. More recently, Peter Robinson discussed the work he and the team has done in enabling PARSEC with Fedora 33 on our YouTube channel. During KubeCon Cloud Native Security day on Nov. 17th, Arm joins VMware to present PARSEC multi-tenancy using SPIRE for identity management.
In complement to our involvement with CNCF, Arm is a founding member of the Confidential Computing Consortium (CCC), initiative launched in 2019. The initiative’s aim is to enable collaboration and projects to protect data in use by performing computation in a hardware-based Trusted Execution Environment (TEE). The CCC website hosts projects and include white papers describing the problems being addressed in more depth with some examples of use-cases where confidential computing projects can help.
Arm has invested engineering efforts to enable some of the foundational elements of cloud native stacks. These include Kubernetes and tracking conformance on Arm as well as some of the components such as container runtimes that underpin execution and isolation of workloads. Jia He from Arm presents work on Kata containers performance evaluation and optimization on Arm64. Testing includes a range of workloads including NGINX, Redis, and TensorFlow.
Network infrastructure also forms a critical part of the software stack when planning deployments and needs to be as efficient and reliable as possible. One example is using available platform acceleration capability. Service mesh help manage network topology and services efficiently, with the ability to scale to support large-scale deployments. This builds on a range of Container Network Interfaces (CNI) modules such as Cilium, Multus, OVN Kubernetes and distributed proxies such as Envoy. Please, check out the session from Trevor Tao from Arm and Hanyu Ding from China Mobile highlighting contributions and some considerations when assessing performance on Arm.
KubeCon and conferences are great forums to meet with developers and keep up to date on projects. We refreshed the Arm Developer website earlier this year, providing a broader mix of resources, communication channels, and support to help people develop on Arm. These provide opportunities for developers to engage with Arm, our partners and innovators who experiment and push boundaries further using Arm technology.
Many platform options and CI tools are available to Arm developers, with new ones coming on board. Earlier this year, we published a blog describing how to setup a CI build environment for Arm64 to enable multi-architecture builds of the Envoy project. In this example, we showcase Azure Pipelines on AWS Graviton2. Check out the CI/CD section of the Arm developer site for more information.
You can also follow us on the @ArmSoftwareDev Twitter channel, engage directly with Arm evangelists on YouTube livestreams or chat in real time on Discord channels.
Wishing everyone a good KubeCon NA 2020 and looking forward to seeing you at our booth.
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Thank you