Bangkok, Thailand - Linaro Ltd., the collaborative engineering organization developing open source software for the ARM® architecture, announced the rollout of an ARMv8 based Developer Cloud today at Linaro Connect in Bangkok. In collaboration with its silicon, server and software members, Linaro is providing developers with access to a cloud-based native ARM development environment, which can be used to design, develop, port and test server, cloud and IoT applications without substantial upfront hardware investment.

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-centers 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 utilize 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 virtualization. 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, Inc., 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.

Partner Quotes

Suresh Gopalakrishnan, Corporate Vice President, Enterprise Solutions Engineering, AMD
“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.”

Jeff Underhill, Director of Server Programs, ARM
“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.”

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

Elsie Wahlig, Principal Engineer, Data Center Group, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.
“Qualcomm Technologies is pleased to be supporting the Linaro Developer Cloud,” says Elsie Wahlig, Principal Engineer, Data Center 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.”

Jon Masters, chief ARM architect, Red Hat
“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.”

About Linaro

Linaro is leading collaboration on open source development in the ARM ecosystem. The company has over 200 engineers working on consolidating and optimizing open source software for the ARM architecture, including developer tools, the Linux kernel, ARM power management, and other software infrastructure. Linaro is distribution neutral: it wants to provide the best software foundations to everyone by working upstream, and to reduce non-differentiating and costly low level fragmentation. The effectiveness of the Linaro approach has been demonstrated by Linaro’s growing membership, and by Linaro consistently being listed as one of the top five company contributors, worldwide, to Linux kernels since 3.10.

To ensure commercial quality software, Linaro’s work includes comprehensive test and validation on member hardware platforms. The full scope of Linaro engineering work is open to all online. To find out more, please visit  http://www.linaro.org and  http://www.96Boards.org.