Enabling Cloud-Native Experience Across a Diverse and Secure Edge Ecosystem

The launch of Arm Neoverse was a foundation for cloud to edge infrastructure. Arm has significantly increased its investment in the Cloud Native ecosystem. After joining the Cloud Native Foundation in February 2019, this week we are moving a step further increasing our participation to become Platinum member.

Arm has been active in the cloud native community for some time with projects like Fluentd that are developed by Arm Treasure Data. The project graduated in April this year and has seen a wide adoption by enterprise customers. Contributions grow steadily with more than 900 contributed plug-ins and over 100K downloads a day. Arm is also actively contributing to projects such as Kubernetes, Containerd, Envoy, Vitess, Etcd, Helm, Rook. This is to enable multi-architecture with Arm support. We are also actively involved with some of the incubating and sandbox projects relating to edge and networking (KubeEdge, Virtual Kubelet Kubernetes for example).

We made several announcements at our last developer conference to better enable cloud native. We introduced Project Cassini, an industry initiative that is focused on ensuring a cloud native experience across a diverse and secure edge ecosystem. As well as a Platform Abstraction for SECurity (PARSEC) to enable different root of trust service implementations to be targeted and used at different points of a developer life cycle.

At KubeCon NA, Arm is present along with some of our ecosystem partners who showcase their solutions, including:

• Amazon last month introduced its EC2 A1 bare metal instances that are powered by AWS Graviton processors. These feature 64-bit Arm Neoverse cores enabling services such as Amazon Machine Images (AMI), Elastic Block Store (EBS) and Auto Scaling. You can find more about EKS on A1 and opportunities for cost optimizations with EC2 Spot and A1 instances in booth P16.
• Ampere Computing is showing a multi-node Kubernetes cluster (k3OS deployed via Packet/Terraform) running on top of OpenStack. You can visit Ampere at booth S/E14.
• Canonical is showcasing its multi-cloud Kubernetes solutions along with its latest version of MicroK8s. Canonicals’ Distribution of Kubernetes became commercially available on Arm in 2018. It is tested across a wide range of clouds and systems; from public clouds, to private data centers, from bare metal to virtualized infrastructure. You can find out more visiting booth P36.
• Docker demonstrates its enterprise solutions at booth P37. Arm and Docker announced a strategic partnership at DockerCon’19 (SF) to enable developers to seamlessly build applications for cloud, edge, and IoT environments on Arm. There will also be a session about the work Arm and Docker did to enable secure technology access with modern containerized services using PARSEC API. You can find more about Docker’s activity at KubeCon here.
• Rancher Labs has been collaborating with Arm to deliver a robust, scalable, reliable, and highly available lightweight Kubernetes. In the following live session on Tuesday 19th Nov., you can hear more about Rancher K3s, a certified Kubernetes distribution delivering all the value of Kubernetes in a lightweight, easy to operate package which is ideal for accelerating and delivering solutions at the edge.

Partnering with the leading CI & CD platforms to better enable Cloud Native Projects

Arm has been collaborating with CNCF community and Packet to enable CI for cloud native projects, checking that they build across multiple architectures and provide visibility. The cncf.ci dashboard tracks build and run status of upstream projects. They start with graduated projects and adding new projects over time. The Vulk team are presenting this work in an introduction session on Tuesday 19^th and a deep-dive session on Wednesday 20^th.

In complement to this, we recently highlighted some collaboration with our ecosystem partners to deliver significant advancements in the CI/CD ecosystem on Arm. These include:

• Drone.io partnered with Arm and Packet Cloud to make available a full CI/CD as a service offering on Arm. This service enables Drone.io’s industry leading CI & CD platform and Packet’s cloud service to run container-native, multi-architecture workloads in the cloud.
• GitHub announced last week the general availability of GitHub Actions along with the free use self-hosted runners, artifact caching, and the ability to run Actions on Arm-based platforms like Raspberry Pi.
• GitLab partnered with us to enable support for Arm. Many projects use GitLab Runners on Arm based Kubernetes cluster today. This blog outlines how to use GitLab Runners for Arm based builds to create your own CI pipeline.
• Jenkins has seen a growing support and adoption to run CI natively on Arm platforms, building and testing code for various software frameworks including projects such as Kata-containers and Akraino for example.
• Travis CI support is now available for Arm architecture, making its CI service available on Packet Cloud. Check out this demo video on using Travis CI on Arm machines.

Expanding use of Cloud Native with Edge Networking

LF Edge and ETSI MEC are organizing a Hackathon on 18 November, 2019. Micro-MEC focuses on Smart City use cases. This uses ETSI MEC compliant interfaces and leverage the OpenFAAS serverless platform. The Akraino software stack is based on trusted computing solutions, from trusted hardware to secure networking and signed containers.

There is a growing interest in Cloud-native Network Functions (CNFs) as evolution of VNFs, building on Kubernetes facilities. CNCF launched a new Telecom User Group for service providers and their vendors to speak of the adoption of cloud native technologies. Packet provides bare metal hosting facilities for this activity. A deep-dive CNF session is organized on Thursday 21^st.

We are looking forward to seeing you

Please come and visit us at Booth #S18 if you would like to contact us or are interested in finding out more.

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