Contribution by Packet provides the cloud native community with access to both x86 and ARMv8 bare metal servers for software builds, scale testing, and demonstrations.
San Francisco – August 8, 2017 – The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which is sustaining and integrating open source technologies to orchestrate containers as part of a microservices architecture, today announced the public availability of the CNCF Community Infrastructure Lab for open source projects advancing cloud native computing. The on-demand infrastructure resource is contributed and managed by New York City-based Packet, a leading bare metal cloud for developers, as part of its commitment to the cloud native and open source communities. The lab is located in multiple locations across the globe; including New York City, Silicon Valley, Amsterdam, and Tokyo.
Cloud native computing is a new paradigm based on relying on an open source software stack to enable identical infrastructure on public, private and hybrid clouds. The Community Infrastructure Lab that Packet is enabling provides provisioning of bare metal infrastructure in mere minutes, enabling on-demand access to high performance compute and storage nodes in over 15 global locations. The Lab supports multiple hardware architectures and advanced network features, including allowing networking tests across a diversity of locations and latencies. The infrastructure will provide the CNCF community the provisioning experience of the cloud with the performance characteristics of bare metal servers.
“Packet is thrilled to help accelerate innovation in the cloud native community with our donation of $25,000 per month of resources from our on-demand platform. Thanks to Packet, CNCF is able to offer this computing resource to the community for free,” said Zachary Smith, CEO at Packet. “Cloud native is spreading to all areas of technology; including virtual reality, self-driving cars, embedded devices, and IoT – all of which are dependant on the network. Providing developers free access to test advanced networking will help further innovation.”
Access to the on-demand infrastructure from Packet allows developers extended testing or the ability to build out continuously integrated infrastructure with the automation and consistency of big public clouds without needing to use virtualization. Based on their testing needs, developers can choose from five server configurations offering different sizes, platform features and architectures (e.g. x86 and ARMv8). Each bare metal configuration is API driven, cloud native friendly and takes less than 10 minutes to deploy. Packet does not impose multi-tenancy, virtualization, or an overlay network by default – enabling users to bring the tooling of their choice. Carrier-grade features like the ability to announce your own IP space, BGP/Anycast, and native IPv6 support are also included.
Apply to Use the On-Demand Infrastructure
To use the infrastructure, fill out the application in detail and adhere to the usage requirements including:
- code being run is 100 percent open source;
- allows developers extended testing or the ability to build out continuous integrated infrastructure with the automation and consistency of big public clouds without forced virtualization;
- testing involves containerized workloads, if appropriate.
“Packet has already been donating their on-demand infrastructure to support kernel.org, so it is great to see the company expand its Linux Foundation support to CNCF and the cloud native community,” said Dan Kohn, executive director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. “Several of our members, projects and groups, including CoreDNS, Prometheus, and the Continuous Integration working group, are already making great use of the infrastructure. If you are developing cloud native open source software and want to ensure that it functions at scale, please apply to run it on the CNCF Community Infrastructure Lab.”
To be used by open source projects, this infrastructure can be leveraged to curate server configurations for different use cases, test new protocols without layers of complexity, and integrate with leading cloud and developer tools. Developers will also have the ability to bring their own image or operating system and have complete control of the cluster, enabling them to test across different environments simultaneously.
Additional Resources
About Cloud Native Computing Foundation
Cloud native computing uses an open source software stack to deploy applications as microservices, packaging each part into its own container, and dynamically orchestrating those containers to optimize resource utilization. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) hosts critical components of those software stacks including Kubernetes, Fluentd, Linkerd, Prometheus, OpenTracing, gRPC, CoreDNS, containerd, rkt and CNI; brings together the industry’s top developers, end users and vendors; and serves as a neutral home for collaboration. CNCF is part of The Linux Foundation, a nonprofit organization. For more information about CNCF, please visit: https://cncf.io/.
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