The creators of Rancher Labs and k3s are unveiling a new project: Acorn. Run under the company Acorn Labs and currently in beta, Acorn enables developers to create in a cloud sandbox and easily share their work with others.
According to the creators, the goal of this project is to make “cloud computing accessible, collaborative, and delightful for developers.”
The sandbox environment can be used for up to two hours at a time, and developers get access to 4 GB of RAM at any time. Once the two hours are up, the workloads are stopped, but developers can recreate them whenever they choose.
Developers can run multiple projects through Acorn. The Pro version offers collaboration features where developers can invite team members, who can then collaborate across multiple applications and environments. It also includes management tools where users can set role-based access control policies.
Acorn also provides a set of DevOps tools to handle monitoring, logging, secret management, and cloud management.
There is also a Dev Mode that enables users to work directly on an application while it is running. Changes can be synchronized in real time, debuggers can be added, and logs can be viewed in this mode.
Projects created in Acorn are saved as Acorn Images, which are OCI-compliant and work with any registry. These images are identical wherever they are deployed, which cuts down errors and configuration issues.
“Cloud computing has become increasingly complex for large organizations, let alone individual developers and small teams,” said Sheng Liang, CEO of Acorn. “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.”
