Today’s developers are constantly challenged to deliver their applications for a myriad of infrastructure deployments. These development efforts range from delivering scale up and scale out cloud workloads requiring highest performance requirements to applications delivered at near and far edge locations with platform resource & security constraints. From an infrastructure perspective, it is important to provide a consistent, standardized, and platform agnostic approach for developers to natively build and optimize their applications that enables these deployments across multiple architectures possible. based platforms are at the forefront of providing cloud to edge infrastructure platforms that software developers are increasingly leveraging to build on. From software perspective, Open Source and cloud native software underpins digital transformation efforts globally.

Arm and Red Hat have a strong partnership that fosters software innovations for a wide range of cloud to edge platforms. Our partnership is based on three key pillars that allow software developers to reliably innovate

• Strong collaboration in driving open standards initiatives by taking leadership roles across industry consortia such as The Linux Foundation and Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)
• Joint engineering providing developers with choice to build their applications on foundational software such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat OpenShift on multiple Arm platforms.
• Innovative approach to bring energy-efficient solutions to address future deployment needs across Telco and Edge segments

Building on standards and collaboration

Arm and Red Hat have partnered across multiple standardization efforts driving innovation across the hardware and software ecosystem. One of the key standardization initiatives driven by Arm Is SystemReady. SystemReady is a compliance certification program based on a set of hardware and firmware standards that ensures subsequent layers of the software, specifically the Operating System (OS), functions seamlessly on Arm architecture. Red Hat has been a fervent promoter of standardization with Arm SystemReady initiative, enabling the certification of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Arm-based platforms and helping partners to ensure that developers can install and run generic, off-the-shelf operating systems out of the box across different footprints. Platforms that have been certified with Red Hat Enterprise Linux are available from Red Hat ecosystem catalogue. Recent and popular platform to be added to that catalogue include HPE Proliant RL300 powered by Arm Neoverse based Ampere Altra processors.

Another area where standardization is driving next generation software innovation is around Data Processing Unites (DPUs). DPUs provide specialized compute to offload infrastructure tasks from the main CPU and free the main CPU to run applications. Arm and Red Hat are Premier members of the Open Programmable Infrastructure (OPI) project hosted by the Linux Foundation. OPI is building on open software and standards to help ensure that compliant DPUs will work with any server. DPUs are used to perform specific tasks with less energy and higher performance such as accelerating networking operations, security, and storage tasks for example. Arm SystemReady certification program is also being expanded to support deployment scenarios that include DPU devices that can run Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat OpenShift. We will be showcasing solutions that include DPUs in our booth.

Areas of collaboration within the Cloud Native Foundation, besides Kubernetes, include projects such as KubeVirt to enable virtual machine workloads on top of Kubernetes, cloud-native storage orchestrator with Rook or more recently project Kepler (Kubernetes-based Efficient Power Level Exporter) which has been accepted as CNCF sandbox project to contribute to sustainable computing.

For Edge and Automotive, Red Hat is an active participant in the Scalable Open Architecture for Embedded Edge (SOAFEE) initiative launched by Arm to define an open-standards-based architecture for the software-defined vehicle. The aim of this initiative is to enable prototyping, workload exploration and early development. Participants include leading commercial solutions providers to maximize compatibility and provide a faster route to functionally safe designs.

Linux and Cloud Native Software

Linux is used as the foundation of many open-source deployments, providing the operating system needed to manage the underlying hardware and tools to build and deploy applications. It is the result of extensive collaboration, from hardware manufacturers and IP providers like Arm to the software community and companies like Red Hat who further develop it to provide stability and compatibility including the latest technology. The recent releases of Red Hat Enterprise Linux includes support for latest Arm features. RHEL 9.2 adds support for 64k page-sizes, for example, enabling better performance for some types of memory- and CPU-intensive operations. With all major cloud providers offering RHEL support for Arm-based instances, developers can consistently build their applications to achieve the performance and power efficiencies provided by the Arm architecture.

Within cloud native software landscape, Kubernetes is used as the main framework to automate deployments, scaling, and perform management of containerized applications. Some of the use-cases include managing DevOps resources to deliver automation for software developers or deploy and orchestrate AI/ML workloads. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform builds on upstream kubernetes and includes support for Arm. With its most recent release, Red Hat OpenShift 4.12 added support for Arm-based installer-provisioned infrastructure for Microsoft Azure, as well as enabled multi-architecture compute clusters that could run across both Arm and x86-based infrastructure. This is in addition to the support already available for AWS Graviton 3-based installer-provisioned infrastructure clusters. Disconnected Installation Mirroring is also supported to install clusters that have limited access to the internet, such as a disconnected or restricted network cluster.

Energy-Efficient Telco & Edge Solutions

Arm and ecosystem partners are collaborating to enable deployment of 5G network infrastructure where performance and energy efficiency are critical. Networks become increasingly virtualized and software driven, driving the need for efficient compute, not just in the base stations but in the core network processing. We are also collaborating with Red Hat to develop virtualized implementation of RAN workloads using Red Hat Enterprise Linux and OpenShift that can be used for building energy-efficient solutions.

For more constrained devices, Red Hat Device Edge was introduced recently. This is a lightweight kubernetes implementation, based on MicroShift, to target edge computing workloads for devices such as IoT gateways, point-of-sales terminals, robots, and drones. Many of these platforms are built on Arm, to benefit from low-power features, security (FDO) and the ability to include accelerators for specialized functions (GPUs, video processing etc.). SystemReady plays a critical role with these, so that devices can be described accurately enabling software to run without changes.

Visit Arm at Red Hat Summit, booth # 118!

We are excited to showcase these solutions at the Red Hat Summit 2023. We will have demonstrations showing multi-architecture support in OpenShift, providing a way to try out specific applications on a different architecture while maintaining an existing environment. We will also show a demo of how deploying Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Arm Neoverse based platforms can deliver 5G Private Networks with energy-efficient vRAN solutions.

I you are attending Red Hat Summit 2023 in person, visit our booth to learn more about these topics, take an opportunity to have a conversation with our experts on-site and see demonstrations of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and OpenShift running on Arm.

For more information on Arm software ecosystem, please refer Arm Developer Resources. You can also reach out to us directly on Twitter (@ArmSoftwareDev) or through email.  

Visit Arm Infrastructure Solutions Page