Canonical, the publisher of the open source Ubuntu operating system, announced Wednesday the availability of the Anbox Cloud Appliance in AWS Marketplace. The appliance allows Android developers to go from prototype to production. 

The Anbox Cloud Appliance is a scaled down version of Canonical’s Anbox Cloud, which developers use for rapid prototyping and gives them access to a more extensive set of instance types, including support for Arm CPUs and NVIDIA GPUs than the appliance does.

“With the Anbox Cloud Appliance in AWS Marketplace, prototyping, developing and running Android in the cloud becomes simple and a powerful tool in the hands of our customers with access to a wide range of instance types, including Arm and NVIDIA GPUs,” said Alex Gallagher, vice president of Public Cloud at Canonical, in a press release. 

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The Anbox Cloud Appliance provides a developer-friendly command line interface and a simple web user interface to manage and run cloud-based Android applications. Developers can upload Android apps, configure and virtualize Android devices, and stream graphical output in real-time to any web or mobile client, the company said. 

Anbox Cloud Appliance can also be used as a sandbox for mobile app testing. The Anbox Cloud Appliance is based on the Ubuntu Pro OS and includes security updates for 10 years and access to kernel live patches. According to the AWS Marketplace website, game streaming, cloud based mobile application management, mobile device virtualization, and mobile app testing can all be done using the appliance.

“Canonical’s Anbox Cloud provides our customers with an easy and powerful way to run large numbers of Android instances in parallel on a single AWS instance, and with support for both x86 and Arm instances, customers can choose the best option for their use case,” said Mona Chadha, director of AWS Marketplace Category Management, AWS, in a press release. 

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The availability of NVIDIA GPUs on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) G4dn instances allows for access to hardware-accelerated rendering while video encoding provides a low latency cloud streaming solution. By working with NVIDIA, Canonical aims to optimize Anbox Cloud for their GPUs.

Canonical’s Anbox platform works with NVIDIA’s Linux and Android software stacks to virtualize mobile apps and stream them securely at scale to 5G mobile devices, said Phil Eisler, vice president and general manager of NVIDIA’s GeForce Now Cloud gaming service, in a press release.

Pricing starts at $0.025 per hour for developers running on G4dn.2xlarge instance, which includes 32 Gibibyte (GiB) of memory, 8 virtual cores, 1 Nvidia T4 GPU (16GB), 225 GiB of storage and up to 25 Gbps of networking. AWS estimates EC2 infrastructure costs for this particular instance at $0.752 per hour. Many other options also are available.

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