How many Android containers can you fit on your VM? – Guide
Currently, there are a variety of options available for running Android application development environments. Even Microsoft has promised that its next Windows 11 will be able to run applications on the desktop and has long supported mobile SO through your Phone app even while smothering your sick Windows Phone with a fluffy Android pillow. For Canonical, however, Anbox remains a cloud product, according to Simon Fels, engineering manager, and therefore it is unlikely that feature on any desktop version of the company’s Ubuntu distribution soon, although with the September announcement it will now happily climb from the heights of the cloud to a single virtual machine via the Appliance version. “The software that is running is practically identical,” explains Fels, regarding the differences in the Appliance version of Anbox Cloud. Instead, the goal is to make it easier for developers to get started: “We wanted to let people dive right in and do something with Android containers without having to spend time setting up up infrastructure, deploying things and so on. ” The result is somewhat agnostic. While a lot was made of the AWS Marketplace at launch, Fels tells us there was little to stop an Ubuntu Advantage subscriber from firing up Anbox Cloud just about anywhere: “We already have a lot of people doing this.” As for Anbox itself, Fels started a GitHub repository a few years ago with the goal of running Android in containers. “Canonical,” he says, “was heavily investing in Ubuntu Touch as a smartphone operating system, where we were trying to solve the app availability issue to get more apps for [it] which Anbox was an approach. ” Canonical moved away from Ubuntu Touch, but, as Fels puts it, they “saw customer interest” in the idea of running Android apps in the cloud (“mostly for cloud gaming,” Fels noted) and Anbox Cloud began. Fels is keen to emphasize that the Anbox internal cloud was a different beast than the open source project. “Anbox Cloud is an independent code base, does not share code with the Anbox open source project on GitHub and is not available under an open source license,” he says. “There is a lot more features… It has more graphics support and is highly optimized specifically for high density. ” In that case, put as many Android instances on a machine as possible. “Both have the same origin in the original prototype I made years ago, so share similar names and ideas, but the Anbox cloud code is much more developed and has a different target use case (desktop vs cloud).” As for Android itself, it’s pretty much unchanged, though Fels notes that instances don’t pass all compliance tests. “Among those we didn’t pass,” he says, “there are some that just don’t apply to cloud-based instances like CTS [Compatibility Test Suite] was designed with physical devices in mind and others that our containerization precludes. “So there is still a small number where we have bugs pending to be fixed. “Usually”, he adds, “we are compatible with standard Android”. As long as there are no Google Play dependencies, of course. As for the use of resources, the instances could, from a technical point of view, consume what is available. However, “we have resource allocations for each of the containers just to ensure that a single one cannot span the entire machine.” Containers are also insulated from each other. Going forward, with the vast majority of Android apps running on Arm hardware, “physical Arm is absolutely a topic for us,” says Fels. Of course, Android will work fine on x86 silicon, but Arm tends to be where it is. “The problem we’re trying to solve,” he adds, “is not just a software problem, it’s also a hardware problem. “Since Android is primarily an Arm platform, it’s absolutely necessary to have someone providing a competitive Arm service. “We are working closely with Ampere Computing,” he continues, “and supporting the Altra chip family by default. We generally run on any Ubuntu-certified Arm platform, including AWS Graviton where the Anbox Cloud Appliance is available on the AWS Marketplace. ” As for the purpose of the service, Fels points out that developers adopt it as a first entry point “who have an idea and want to see if it’s a good one”. Then there are those who are thinking about how they can make use of Android in the cloud and, we assume, withdraw and move apps away from devices. The team is also considering a long-term maintenance option. Not in the meaning of Ubuntu’s five to 10 year phrase, “more in the sense that we’d like to have a longer release period for an individual release, as we’re releasing a new minor version every three months.” Fels adds that the containers themselves are not forced to update. They are, however, ephemeral and demand that the state be preserved. And does Android update itself? “We are not a Google partner, so we don’t receive these patches up front. So we usually publish an update for a patch release for Anbox Cloud in the middle of each month. ” Please share this article if you like it!
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