The team that founded Rancher, the most popular multi-cloud management platform, has launched a new cloud platform called Acorn.
Sheng Liang, Shannon Williams, Darren Shepherd, and Will Chan are serial entrepreneurs with an impeccable track record of building successful open source technology companies.
Before co-founding Acorn Labs, they built Cloud.com, which was acquired by Citrix in 2012, and Rancher Labs, which was acquired by German open source software company SUSE in 2020.
Darren Shepherd, the brain behind some of the most widely used open source software such as K3, is the architect of the Acorn platform.
Acorn is a next-generation application platform that simplifies the process of deploying and running containerized apps in the cloud. It abstracts the complex DevOps workflows involved in working with Kubernetes and managed services available in the public cloud.
Acorn Labs offers Sandbox, a free computing environment on the cloud where anyone with a GitHub account can run, test, and develop apps. The premium flavor, Acorn Pro, is intended for running applications in production environments in AWS Regions.
Developers define applications and their dependencies in a well-defined, structured format called an Acornfile. Dependencies can be other containerized workloads or managed cloud services such as Amazon RDS, Amazon S3, or Amazon SQS. The Acorn platform builds definitions into a unified image based on the standard OCI format that can be signed, stored, and pulled from standard container registries. Acornfile is declarative, so it can be easily integrated into your existing CI/CD pipeline or GitOps workflow.
Acorn comes with a set of pre-built services, including relational and NoSQL databases. A developer can easily reference these services in his Acornfile and use them in his applications without provisioning or configuring them individually.
The ability to share Acorn applications through links is what makes this platform interesting. Users who receive the link can deploy his Acorn to the sandbox and try it out with one click. Developers can gain visibility into the number of times a link is used to deploy software over time.
Acorn runs on a Kubernetes cluster, but developers don’t need to know anything about the underlying infrastructure. Acorn completely abstracts the workflow of creating resources such as pods, services, configmaps, secrets, volumes, etc. through a simplified process. Container images are Acorn’s basic deployment unit. As long as the developer includes a Dockerfile to build the source code into an image, Acorn can take over the deployment process.
Although still in beta, Acorn’s value proposition is compelling. This allows developers and operators to treat the cloud as an application runtime without having to deal with complex identity management, network security, role-based access control, or complex configuration. Acorn’s design allows it to become multi-cloud in the future, allowing developers to target any public cloud to their infrastructure with minimal changes to code and configuration.
Last week, Microsoft released an open source project called Radius that is similar to Acorn. Both have the same goals and follow the same design principles. With containerization becoming the de-facto standard and the widespread adoption of public clouds, new platforms are needed to integrate and abstract disparate infrastructures.
Acorn and Radius are examples of next-generation platforms that fundamentally redefine how modern applications are deployed and managed.
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