December 2023 Ampere Developer Newsletter

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Hello Everyone,

Winter is upon most of us, and we are looking forward to the holiday season and the New Year yet trying to finish up all our projects for 2023 and planning for 2024. Well, the same goes here for the Ampere Developer Newsletter. We also had a very busy November with some big announcements at KubeCon and a lot of new content on the Ampere Developer site that we want to share with you before we take some time off.

KubeCon and CloudNativeCon

As you probably know, KubeCon is one of the largest open source events and Ampere was there. Before KubeCon started, we sponsored AppDeveloperCon as part of the Co-located events. It was great to see speakers from Adobe, Red Hat, Diagrid, Okta, and others. We really appreciate all the speakers who came out and shared their knowledge with the community. And if you missed any of them, you can check out the talks on the CNCF YouTube channel.

And what seems to be a new normal for us at large events, there was a big announcement for KubeCon. Oracle announced that they will be donating $3 million in OCI A1 and A2 credits, per year, for the next 3 years in support of CNCF projects.

This follows up with the release of our CNCF project that Dave Neary, Director of Developer Relations at Ampere, announced the week before. The program is a joint effort between CNCF, Equinix, Actuated, and Ampere supporting Arm64 native CI builds for CNCF Projects. What does this mean? The short answer is that CNCF projects can easily build their projects on Actuated for GitHub Actions, which are more secure than self-hosted runners for public projects. For more details, check out Dave’s blog post and announcement for the project.

We ended the first day with a joint Ampere Developers Program and Arm Developers Program evening at the Williams’ Inn for some Chicago deep dish pizza and beers.

The following day, Ampere community members were giving talks around the event. Dave and Peter Pouliot, giving talks about “Incremental Migration to Heterogeneous Architecture Kubernetes Clusters” and “Building the Sustainable Cloud of Tomorrow” and we ended the event with a conversation with Arm’s Innovation Coffee. Plus, we met over 150 members and collected way too many t-shirts. We are looking forward to KubeCon EU in March, where hopefully we can give an update on the project.

Community Highlights

We have had a couple of great blogs and an announcement. First is our Weekend Read by community member Peter Kessler, What Does the Java Virtual Machine Do all Day? about his use of a new GNU profiling tool, gprofng, to dig into the dynamic behavior of a Java application.

Next, we have a cool interview with Ampere’s head of AI Victor Jakubiuk about how energy-efficiency is a huge issue with building AI models and how you should use the correct tool for the job. And speaking of AI, Ampere announced that its optimized frameworks for PyTorch, Tensorflow, and ONNXRT are available via the Google Cloud Marketplace.

What’s Next - 2024

We want to thank you for all your help in 2023. The community has doubled in size and with your help we can double again in 2024. We have some big plans that we will be announcing soon, but we can say that in short order we are starting up an interview podcast where we get to talk to community members to get their insights on the world arm64/aarch64 servers and the software that makes them run. Our first episode should be released early in January 2024 and will feature an interview with the leads of our CNCF project, and then interviews with some open-source projects leads and companies about their experiences of moving to arm64 servers. And that is just the start. Have an idea of someone in the community that you would like to hear from? Let us know and we will reach out to them.

Events and CFPs

As always, we end this with the events and CFPs that we have found. We do this because we want our community to be able to get out there and speak. Check it out here and let us know where you are speaking.