Arm Neoverse: the software platform from AI edge to cloud infrastructure

Last year, at TechCon, we announced Neoverse and Arm’s plans for the infrastructure market. Two of the major pieces to that plan, and the building out of the Neoverse platform, were to:

• Accelerate the maturity of the cloud native software stack from the edge of the network to the cloud and become the #1 platform for Edge to Cloud infrastructure.
• Make the developer experience on Arm frictionless through building out the software stack and enabling a complete set of developer tools.

Before I talk about what the Neoverse ecosystem is announcing at TechCon this year, I think it is worth highlighting some of the major news from the past year.   

• AWS Graviton Shortly after TechCon, at AWS Re:invent in November 2018, AWS announced AWS Graviton, based on Arm Neoverse.
• Arm becomes Gold Member in CNCF In February 2019, Arm accelerated its work with the Cloud Native Compute Foundation (CNCF).
• Docker Support for Arm In April 2019, at DockerCon SF, Arm announced a strategic partnership with Docker.
• RHEL full support for Arm In May 2019, Red Hat announced RHEL 8 with full support for Arm, expanding its ecosystem.
• Akraino foundation announces edge blueprints based on Arm In June 2019, the Akraino Foundation announced the release of Akraino edge use cases including multiple use cases based on Arm.
• VMware showcases ESXi on Arm innovations At VMworld US 2019 keynote, VMware demoed 4 hypervisor instances running on a single appliance by running ESXi on Arm on multiple SmartNICs.
• NGINX on Arm (Amazon EC2 A1 shows up to 40% cost savings) Arm, NGINX and AWS partnered to enable the NGINX Application Platform on AWS providing up to 40% cost savings compared to other EC2 instances.

But we are just getting started! This year promises to be even bigger for the Arm software ecosystem and the Neoverse developer community as the momentum from edge to cloud continues to build.

In conjunction with our ecosystem partners, this week and in some cases the weeks preceding TechCon, we are announcing a number of strategic partnerships, products and initiatives that will bring us closer to our goal of being the #1 platform for cloud native software from edge to cloud and making the developers experience on Arm frictionless.

Edge to Cloud CI/CD – partnering with the leading CI/CD platforms

One of the keys to developing and deploying cloud native code is having the platforms and tooling in place to enable easy and tightly integrated development and deployment processes. As part of that effort, we are working with our ecosystem partners to deliver new significant advancements in the Arm CI/CD ecosystem:

• Drone.io CI as a service on Packet Cloud: Arm has partnered with Drone.io and Packet Cloud to make available a full CI/CD as a service offering on Arm. This service enables software developers to leverage Drone.io’s industry leading CI/CD platform and Packet’s cloud service to run container-native, multi-architecture workloads in the cloud. Today, over 20,000 CI build jobs happen on Arm each month.
• GitLab support for Arm Architecture: Gitlab and Arm are partnering to enable support for Arm on GitLab. GitLab is becoming a popular CI/CD platform in the cloud-native ecosystem. Many projects such as CNCF.CI are already using GitLab Runners on Arm based Kubernetes cluster today and this blog outlines how to use Gitlab Runners for Arm based builds to create your own CI pipeline.
• Jenkins CI community support and active deployments for Arm: Many projects and developers leverage Jenkins today on Arm. Jenkins is used for Arm CI in many open source projects and communities. We continue to see growing support and adoption of Jenkins across the Arm community.
• JFrog Conan.io on Arm: For C/C++ developers on Arm, check out how Conan.io benefits internal Arm software teams with their development efforts.
• Travis CI & Arm partners enabling Arm support:  This week, Travis CI, one of the leading CI/CD platforms in the industry, is announcing support for Arm architecture. Travis is making its CI service available on Packet Cloud. As of the release of this blog, multiple open source projects such as OpenSSL are being built on Arm hardware using Travis CI.

Laptop to Cloud - A wide range of Development Platforms

One of the many strengths of the Arm ecosystem is its diversity of silicon providers. Like our broad range of silicon partners, there are many different Arm development environments as well. We are actively working with the ecosystem to enable the development platforms that enable a broad range of development use cases to run on Arm.

• Frictionless container development In April we announced product integration and optimization for Arm based workloads running on Docker Desktop as I mentioned above. This work enabled over 2M Docker desktop users to develop and deploy Arm based containers using the tools they love - Docker Desktop and Docker Hub. Year over Year, we have seen an increase of 2.6 times in the number of Arm devices requesting images from HUB and 4 times increase in Arm activity on HUB. This year at TechCon, we will be showing how we are taking that work and making it easy for IoT and AI Edge developers to build and deploy containers at the AI edge and beyond.
• Arm Native laptop for Linux and Windows based developers Today we are demonstrating native Arm laptop development leveraging the Qualcomm based laptops in the market today. In conjunction with the open source community and Linaro, we now have fully enabled Linux environments on powerful Qualcomm based laptops. This open source work enables Linux and Windows developers to develop natively on Arm based laptops.
• Leveraging the AWS Cloud to develop your apps on Arm With the availability of AWS A1, it is now easier than ever for developers to develop on Arm. Rancher is one example of a software partner that has leveraged A1 to natively develop on Arm. 
• Packet Cloud Our partnership with Packet enables access to public cloud services with Arm infrastructure for CI/CD and many key projects including CNCF CI/CD on Arm.
• Wide range of Developer Platforms Just like the arm silicon ecosystem – the arm developer platform ecosystem is broad as well. With many offerings targeting specific use cases. Arm supports a number of development platforms for various use cases from Raspberry Pi to full blown servers. For a full list of development platforms, please visit this page.

Enabling the Software stack and Developer at the AI Edge

Arm and its partners have been aggressively working to enable the new AI Edge. This new AI edge greatly leverages the work done in the cloud and is based on the cloud native software stack.  From operating systems, to modern language support to containerized and virtualized environments, and the CI/CD tooling, the pieces are in place.  A few new items being announced at TechCon around AI Edge Software are:

• Rancher K3s on Arm: As edge computing evolves, more and more of the architectures are turning to Kubernetes to increase speed of deployment of new services, deliver unprecedented scale, and improve efficiency of operations. With this strategic partnership, we are jointly delivering a robust, scalable, reliable and highly available solution with lightweight Kubernetes with Rancher k3s with Arm based edge platforms.
• Docker for AI edge development:
  • We partnered with Docker on a workshop to showcase frictionless container development for AI edge and IoT developers deploying workloads on Arm edge devices accelerated by the latest technologies such as Docker Templates. In case you missed it, we will create a webinar and host virtual meetups recapping the workshop.
  • When delivering apps to the edge, security is a top priority. Partnering with Docker, we announced a security project that will lay the foundation for hardware backed security for Edge workloads.
  • Arm and Docker are working together to bring you virtual meetups showcasing projects that highlight best practices for cloud native development targeting Arm architecture in the cloud and at the edge. Join this group for event updates.

Our mission to enable the software ecosystem for Arm Neoverse continues to be the same moving forward:

• Accelerate the maturity of the cloud native software stack from the edge of the network to the cloud
• Make the developer experience on Arm frictionless

I think you will agree we have, with our partners and the open source community, made a lot of progress. But there is still much to do. If you would like to contact us with suggestions or are interested in how to partner with the Neoverse ecosystem we can be reached at askaidc@arm.com or feel free to contact me directly at kevin.ryan@arm.com. And of course, stop by the Infrastructure Zone this week at TechCon to learn more about the progress we are making to deliver the cloud to edge infrastructure for a world of 1 trillion devices.

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