Acorn Labs Unfurls Cloud Service to Simplify Building Kubernetes Apps
Acorn Labs today made available a public beta of a development environment accessed via the cloud that promises to make it simple to build cloud-native applications at a higher level of abstraction that eliminates the need to be familiar with how Kubernetes clusters operate.
Deployed on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud, the Acorn service provides access to up to 4 GB of RAM in a sandbox environment for up to two hours that is based on open source Acorn images created using a framework developed by Acorn Labs. That framework, as an alternative to tools such as Docker Compose, provides access to a higher level of abstraction that makes it simpler to build and deploy applications on Kubernetes clusters.
Acorn Labs president Shannon Williams said the immediate goal is to provide developers with access to a cloud service that makes it simpler to experiment with building applications using Acorn images that comply with the Open Container Initiative (OCI) specification. As such, those images can be stored in any registry.
Built from Acorn files, Acorn images require much less cognitive load on the part of a developer to create, said Williams. The overall goal is to increase the pace at which cloud-native applications can be built and deployed, he added. The current approaches used to build these applications require too much heavy lifting, noted Williams.
Additionally, Acorn Labs is making available Professional Accounts that make it simpler for developers to collaborate with one another using application templates that are accessed by invoking URLs, he added. There is also an Acorn Dev Mode that provides direct access to a running Acorn application and synchronizes real-time changes, attaches debuggers and views live logs. That capability, in addition to simplifying onboarding, makes it possible to create instances of production environments in minutes.
The Acorn service also provides a command line interface (CLI) along with a range of DevOps tools to provide monitoring, logging and secrets management via a central management console.
Acorn images were first made available in 2022, but the tooling required to make them accessible to developers as an alternative to existing container images is just now becoming available. In effect, Acorn Labs is looking to strike a balance between making it simpler to build applications using images without requiring organizations to adopt an overly opinionated platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment, noted Williams.
It’s not clear to what degree development teams may be willing to replace their existing tools for building cloud-native applications, but with the increased emphasis on developer productivity, many organizations are looking for ways to build and deploy applications at scale faster.
The challenge, as always, is allowing time for developers to become familiar with an alternative approach to building applications that is likely to also require adjustments to the DevOps workflows used to deploy applications.
One way or another, however, the rate at which cloud-native applications are being developed and deployed needs to improve as organizations move to replace monolithic applications that typically are harder to update and more expensive to run.
