Requirements¶
To run Anbox Cloud, you must fulfill a few minimum requirements, which differ depending on whether you plan to use charmed Anbox Cloud or the appliance.
See Variants for an explanation of the differences between both variants.
General requirements¶
The following requirements apply to both 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 and could cause issues.
The later sections of this topic provide information about the supported Ubuntu versions.
Requirements for the appliance¶
Ubuntu¶
The appliance supports the following Ubuntu versions:
Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish)
Ubuntu 24.04 (Noble Numbat)
LXD¶
The appliance supports LXD >= 5.0.
By default, LXD is installed from the 5.21/stable track.
If LXD is already installed but the version is earlier than 5.0, run snap refresh --channel=5.21/stable lxd to update it. If you are already on LXD version 5.21, do not downgrade it as it may render LXD unusable.
Hardware requirements¶
The following hardware specifications are required for running the appliance:
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 recommendation is the minimum requirement to run the 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, 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.
Requirements for charmed Anbox Cloud¶
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 the minimum requirements are met.
Ubuntu¶
Charmed Anbox Cloud supports Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish).
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¶
Charmed Anbox Cloud requires LXD version >= 5.0.
Juju¶
The charmed Anbox Cloud requires Juju 2.9 or later 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.
Hardware requirements¶
While you can run Anbox Cloud on a single machine, we strongly recommend using several machines for a production environment.
To run an 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.