Acorn Labs announced public beta availability of its
cloud developer platform Acorn, a service that makes it simple for anyone to
run software in their own cloud sandbox and easily share their creations. From
the creators of Rancher and k3s, Acorn aims to make cloud computing accessible,
collaborative and delightful for developers.
Acorn
offers a free sandbox environment where users can deploy software for up to two
hours at a time, as often as they like. Users can experiment with innovative
technologies, learn how containers and server software work, and easily share
their creations, all without cost barriers. This free plan is designed so even
someone with little experience can launch a cloud application as easily as they
install an app on their phone. The only thing users need to sign up for free
access is a GitHub account.
"Cloud
computing has become increasingly complex for large organizations, let alone
individual developers and small teams," said Acorn CEO Sheng Liang. "With
Acorn, we've eliminated that complexity. Users don't need to be experts in
Kubernetes, Terraform, DevOps or AWS to take advantage of the power of cloud
computing. Acorn puts the power of the most popular cloud computing solutions
at your fingertips. The only question is what you will create from then on."
As
users progress to production, Acorn's commercial plans provide flexible and
scalable solutions tailored to the unique needs of organizations of all sizes.
Built on AWS infrastructure, Acorn enables users to pay for infrastructure as
they use it, without having to navigate the complexity of cloud computing
platforms.
Introducing Acorn Links for Application Sharing
Acorn
is also introducing a simple new way for anyone to publish and share
application templates across any channel. Acorn Links are user-generated URLs
that launch private instances of shared applications within a user's free
private sandbox.
With
Acorn Links, users can share application templates on websites, blogs, social
media, videos or even through QR codes, and anyone can experiment with what
they have created without sharing a credit card or being charged for server
hosting.
Here
are a few sample links to launch an app on Acorn:
"Countless
app stacks are being created to leverage advances in AI. Yet setting up a cloud
server and installing software on it is a significant undertaking, even for
DevOps pros. For regular users, this challenge is incredibly daunting and, in
some cases, insurmountable," said Acorn President Shannon Williams. "Acorn
Links will change the status quo by democratizing access to cloud computing
much like GitHub has made coding accessible to all."
Key Features of Acorn:
1. Free Cloud Sandbox: Acorn's free sandbox environment allows
anyone to experience cloud computing without barriers. Whether you want to
build an amazing AI agent or just run
a MERN stack, Acorn provides a powerful runtime environment in the cloud for
everyone to experiment with. Sandbox environments give users the ability to run
up to 4 GB of RAM at any given time for up to two hours. At the end of the two
hours, workloads are stopped but can be recreated as often as a user desires.
2. Collaborative Cloud Development: Acorn accounts can run
multiple projects and, with a Pro account, users can invite team members to
their projects to collaborate on development and testing workflows. Teams can
collaborate across multiple applications and environments, rapidly spinning up
new testing and development environments. When a workload goes into production,
Acorn's team management tools allow users to define role-based access control
(RBAC) policies and enforce controls.
3. Production-Grade Infrastructure: While the Acorn sandbox is
always free, by upgrading to a Pro account, users can deploy to pro regions and
run their applications without any limitations. Acorn infrastructure is
deployed on Amazon Web Services (AWS) with resource billing based on
consumption.
4. Acornfiles and Acorn Images: Workloads on Acorn are created by launching
Acorn Images, which are built from Acorn Files. Acorn Images are OCI-compliant,
work with any registry and will be familiar to anyone who has experience with
containers. Like containers, Acorn Images are identical wherever and whenever
they are deployed. In other words, all environments, whether they are
development, testing or production, are consistent. This dramatically reduces
errors and environment configuration challenges. Acorn Images are based on the
open-source Acorn Runtime project (https://github.com/acorn-io/runtime),
which was released in 2022 and can be run on any Kubernetes cluster.
5. Production Operations Tooling: Every Acorn deployment
includes an intuitive set of DevOps tools, including monitoring, logging,
secret management and a powerful cloud-based management console. Users can
access Acorn environments directly from a powerful command line interface (CLI)
and easily integrate it with existing workflows or CI tools.
6. Acorn Dev Mode: Acorn Dev Mode can be used on any Acorn, allowing users to work
directly on a running Acorn application. With Dev mode, Acorn users can
synchronize real-time changes, attach debuggers and view live logs against a
running app. Development teams can create dev instances of production
environments in minutes and launch them in dev mode so they can immediately see
their work. New developers can join projects and come up to speed quickly by
creating dev environments identical to production.
7. Deploy to Your Own AWS Accounts: Acorn Platinum and
Enterprise accounts can create Acorn Private Regions using their own AWS
accounts. With Acorn Private Regions, teams are charged directly by AWS for
whatever infrastructure and services they consume, while still having all the
application management capabilities of Acorn. Acorn Private Regions make it
easy for teams to utilize AWS credits and discounts. Acorn Private Regions also
support direct Acorn access to AWS services such as RDS, SQS and S3, making
cloud native development seamless.
Acorn is currently in beta,
and standard accounts are available for everyone at
www.acorn.io.