DevOps has moved from being a trend to an established cornerstone of the software development and delivery lifecycle. Today, the best practices of DevOps are being applied, in new and unique ways, to edge computing. As a board member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, I participate in open source communities regularly and over the years, I have collaborated with various folks from Arm because today where there is the edge, there is Arm.
As the technical evangelism leader at GitLab, I got involved with folks from the Arm project when collaborating on CNCF.ci. GitLab is a complete DevOps platform, delivered as a single application. A key component of our product is our CI/CD pipeline that is well loved and used in the industry. Arm, through its market leadership in the mobile and embedded space, is now expanding into infrastructure space for edge-to-cloud applications. There is tremendous potential to grow within this emerging space and offer software developers a frictionless environment to develop innovative software at a rapid pace, securely. Arm is having their annual conference Arm TechCon 2019 this week in San Jose, California, and I thought this is a great opportunity to highlight key projects and activities happening within the ecosystem involving Arm and GitLab:
GitLab for edge base research projects
Eric Van Hensbergen, R&D fellow from Arm's Research team, has been leading an effort to use GitLab for edge base research projects creating multi-architecture images using Docker containers, including running GitLab’s 64-bit Runner on Arm instances on public cloud providers such as Packet Cloud and AWS. You can access the runner for yourself too!
Stream processing on the edge
Last month at GitLab Commit Brooklyn, GitLab’s first ever user conference, Eduardo Silva, principal engineer from Arm Treasure Data, delivered a talk on the benefits of stream processing on the edge in distributed systems using Fluent Bit (a Fluentd open source sub-project).
Join the CNCF CI Working Group Monthly Meeting
Today, all projects on CNCF.CI are being built and tested on both x86 and Arm architecture inside a Kubernetes test environment hosted on Packet’s bare metal infrastructure. For anyone interested, the working group hosts open meetings every month. More details are available in their Monthly Meeting doc. It’s a great group and I recommend people attend.
There are a lot of exciting activities happening in the edge-to-cloud and DevOps space. As a developer evangelist, I know the value Arm brings to the ecosystem and am excited to see the commencement of the GitLab and Arm partnership. More announcements to come in the near future. Stay tuned!
