Linaro, the collaborative engineering organization developing open source software for the ARM architecture, is rolling out an ARMv8 based Developer Cloud. 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.