Ubuntu developer Canonical Ltd. is pushing harder into Android application development with today’s launch of its Anbox Cloud Appliance on Amazon Web Services Inc.’s Marketplace.

The Anbox Cloud appliance is said to be a “small-scale” version of the company’s Anbox Cloud platform and provides a fast and easy “prototype to production” process for cloud-based Android applications, the company said.

Anbox Cloud is a service that runs Android as a guest operating system to containerize workloads so they can easily be distributed from the cloud, where they run, to any kind of mobile device. It’s used to run high-powered applications on any kind of Android device, regardless of hardware’s compute capabilities.

The Anbox Cloud Appliance deploys Anbox Cloud to a single machine running on AWS. Canonical said doing this makes it more suitable for initial prototyping and small-scale application deployments.

It enables developers to run large numbers of Android instances in parallel on a single AWS instance, explained Mona Chadha, Amazon’s director of AWS Marketplace category management. “With support for both x86 and Arm instances, customers can choose the best option for their use case,” she added.

The Anbox Cloud Appliance is based on the Ubuntu Pro operating system and offers a simple web-based user interface for managing and operating applications in the cloud, as well as a developer-friendly command line interface for coding. Developers can upload existing Android apps, configure and virtualize Android devices, and then stream graphical output in real time to any web or mobile client.

One of the main focuses of Anbox Cloud Appliance is gaming, and the service will enable both hardware-accelerated rendering and low-latency video encoding, leveraging Nvidia Corp.’s advanced graphics processing units via Amazon’s G4 instances.

“Canonical’s Anbox platform provides a complete solution that works seamlessly with Nvidia’s Linux and Android software stacks to virtualize mobile apps, and stream them securely at scale to the growing population of 5G mobile devices,” said Phil Eisler, vice president and general manager of Nvidia’s GeForce Now Cloud gaming service.

Canonical said the Anbox Cloud Appliance can also serve as a cost-effective development sandbox for mobile app testing in use cases such as game streaming, cloud-based mobile application management and mobile device virtualization.

“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 Canonical Vice President of Public Cloud Alex Gallagher.

The Anbox Cloud Appliance is available now on the AWS Marketplace.

Image: Canonical