Requirements¶

To run Anbox Cloud, you must fulfil a few minimum requirements, which differ depending on the kind of deployment you choose.

This topic provides information about the following requirements:

General requirements that apply to all kinds of deployments.
The requirements for the Anbox Cloud Appliance variant.
The requirements for Anbox Cloud variant.

See Variants for an explanation of the differences between both variants.

General requirements¶

The following requirements apply to all variants of Anbox Cloud.

Ubuntu Pro token¶

After registering to Anbox Cloud, you should have received an Ubuntu Pro token. If you haven’t received one, please contact support or your Canonical account representative as you’ll need it to deploy Anbox Cloud.

Ubuntu OS¶

Anbox Cloud is supported only on the Ubuntu operating system. Other Linux-based operating systems are not supported. You must run either the server or the cloud variant of Ubuntu. Running Anbox Cloud on an Ubuntu Desktop installation is not supported.

The later sections of this topic provide information about the supported Ubuntu versions.

Anbox Cloud Appliance¶

The Anbox Cloud Appliance has the following minimum hardware requirements:

64 bit x86 or Arm CPU with >= 4 CPU cores
8 GB of memory
30 GB of free disk space on the main disk
(optional) 100GB block volume to host instance storage

The above defines a minimum of what is necessary to run the Anbox Cloud Appliance. As Anbox Cloud is dependent on available resources to launch its Android containers, the available resources dictate the maximum number of possible Android containers. See Capacity planning for an explanation on how to plan for a specific capacity on your appliance.

On public clouds, it is always recommended to allocate an additional storage volume for instance storage. If no additional storage volume is available, the appliance creates an on-disk image and uses it for instance storage. This is sufficient for very simple cases but does not provide optimal performance and will slow down operations and instance startup time.

For external access to the Anbox Cloud Appliance, you must expose a couple of network ports on the machine where the appliance is running. See Network ports for the list of ports that must be exposed. How to allow incoming traffic on the listed ports differs depending on the cloud used. See the documentation of the cloud for further information on how to change the firewall.

Ubuntu version¶

The Anbox Cloud Appliance supports the following Ubuntu versions:

Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa)
Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish)
Ubuntu 24.04 (Noble Numbat)

LXD version¶

The Anbox Cloud Appliance currently supports the following LXD versions:

>= 5.0

Juju-based deployments¶

Anbox Cloud deployments are managed by Juju. They can be created on all the supported clouds as well as manually provided machines as long as they follow the required minimums.

Ubuntu version¶

Anbox Cloud supports the following Ubuntu versions:

20.04 (focal)
22.04 (jammy)

For new deployments, Ubuntu 22.04 (jammy) is preferred.

Note

The HAProxy load balancer currently has no support for Ubuntu 22.04. Therefore, the Juju bundle uses Ubuntu 20.04 for the machine that runs the load balancer.

LXD version¶

Anbox Cloud currently supports the following LXD versions:

>= 4.0

Juju version¶

The regular Anbox Cloud variant requires Juju 2.9 or later to be installed to manage the different components and their dependencies. You can install Juju with the following command:

snap install --classic --channel=3.1/stable juju

If you wish to install a different version, replace 3.1 in the command with the desired version.

To switch to the 2.9 series, use the following command:

snap refresh --channel=2.9/stable juju

See the Juju documentation for more information.

Minimum hardware requirements¶

While you can run Anbox Cloud on a single machine, we strongly recommend using several machines for a production environment.

To run a full Anbox Cloud deployment including the streaming stack, we recommend the following setup:

ID	Architecture	CPU cores	RAM	Disk	GPUs	FUNCTION
-	amd64 or arm64	4	4GB	50GB SSD	no	Hosts the Juju controller
0	amd64 or arm64	2	2GB	100GB SSD	no	Hosts the load balancer
1	amd64 or arm64	4	8GB	100GB SSD	no	Hosts the streaming stack control plane
2	amd64 or arm64	4	8GB	100GB SSD	no	Hosts the management layer of Anbox Cloud (for example, AMS)
3	amd64 or arm64	8	16GB	200GB NVMe	optional	LXD worker node that hosts the actual containers or virtual machines

To run the core version of Anbox Cloud without the streaming stack, we recommend the following setup:

ID	Architecture	CPU cores	RAM	Disk	GPUs	FUNCTION
-	amd64 or arm64	4	4GB	50GB SSD	no	Hosts the Juju controller
0	amd64 or arm64	4	8GB	100GB SSD	no	Hosts the management layer of Anbox Cloud (for example, AMS)
1	amd64 or arm64	8	16GB	200GB NVMe	optional	LXD worker node that hosts the actual containers or virtual machines

Some additional information:

The ID in the table corresponds to the ID that the Juju bundle uses.
You can mix architectures for the different machines. However, if you have several LXD nodes, all of them must have the same architecture.
The specified number of cores and RAM is only the minimum required to run Anbox Cloud at a sensible performance.

More CPU cores and more RAM on the machine hosting LXD will allow to run a higher number of instances. See Capacity planning for an introduction of how many resources are necessary to host a specific number of instances.
If you require GPU support, see Supported rendering resources for a list of supported GPUs.

Applications not maintained by Anbox Cloud may have different hardware recommendations:

etcd: Hardware recommendations
HAProxy (load balancer for the Stream Gateway and the dashboard): Installation

Please note that these are just baselines and should be adapted to your workload. No matter the application, monitoring and tuning the performance is always important. See Performance for more information.