Hi and welcome to another in the Arm “What Is” program series. In each episode, we dive into a
tech topic to give you insight and perspective into some of today’s hottest design trends.
I’m Brian Fuller, editor-in-chief at Arm and today we’re going to find out what is Project Cassini.
And to help us with that, I want to introduce Nebu Phillips, director,
Infrastructure segment marketing, with Arm. When he’s not helping us
understand what is Project Cassini, Nebu is playing or watching cricket,
listening to podcasts on disruptive technologies or catching up on world history.
Let’s dive right in!
What exactly is Project Cassini?
Thank you, Brian. Project Cassini is an initiative from Arm and our partners
with the goal to bring us secure cloud-native software experience to the edge. It operates
across three vectors: Platform standards, platform security, and cloud- native stacks on the edge.
Project Cassini defines a set of platforms and security standards, certification programs to
check against these standards, and open source and partner software solutions for edge use cases.
Interesting!
Why is cloud-native development at the edge so important?
Platforms all across the edge from industry IoT and automotive systems,
wireless and wired network and security equipment all the way through to edge servers are quite
diverse in terms of their hardware and software structures. The edge demands such heterogeneous
systems assistance, but the experience of interacting with all these platforms at scale, it
needs to be a lot simpler. Unless tried and tested cloud-native development principles are adopted,
the tools/software-powered potential of edge compute will remain unrealized due to different
layers of fragmentation. That’s why we need a cloud-native development paradigm at the edge.
Okay, I understand.
We hear also a lot about Arm SystemReady. And how does that relate to Project Cassini?
Arm SystemReady is one of the foundation pillars of Project Cassini that is focused
on platform standards. Depending on the software needs for a specific edge market segments,
one or more of the Arm SystemReady bands and associated certification programs will apply.
And this will ensure that generic off-the-shelf operating systems simply work on Arm-based
systems. There is a very close tie in between Arm SystemReady as it relates to Project Cassini.
Why is this all happening now as opposed to a few years ago or sometime in the future?
Over the last, I would say, close to a decade or so, the explosive increase in data generation,
consumption, and storage has accelerated the need for a truly distributed model for compute.
One that needs to be a lot closer to data sources and spans various aggregation points along
the IoT and infrastructure edge. As an example, the communication service providers are seeking
newer revenue streams backed by meeting service-level agreements while optimizing for
backhaul and transfer costs and latencies. These types of distributed models need a platform on
which applications can be developed, deployed, and managed at scale in a secured manner.
With the leading-edge footprint, Arm is very well positioned to become the architecture
of choice for the edge supported by initiatives such as Project Cassini. This is the right time
for the ecosystem to collaborate on ensuring that the edge works for these different needs.
That makes sense.
Earlier, you mentioned Arm SystemReady as one of the pillars of this.
Security is also a key pillar of Project Cassini. Can you describe more about how that works?
Yes, so security features across all these different edge devices are very diverse again and
implementations are very fragmented. For the edge to deliver a secure and consistent experience,
application developers would need very clean access, the best-in-class cryptography and
security services without compromising on the possibility of these applications, which are,
by and large, virtualized and containerized. These best-in-class features are typically rooted
in hardware. Now the security vectors of Project Cassini are designed specifically address these
challenges. The PSA Certified Program surfaces security features according to broadly accepted
industry standards, while the open source Parsex API provides cross platform root-of-trust
abstraction. Put together, you can think of the security vectors as sort of a tool kit
that we encourage our ecosystem of partners to employ for their strategies towards the edge.
One less thing to worry about in development, that’s pretty cool!
Well thanks Nebu! In just a few minutes you’ve educated us on the importance of Project Cassini
and cloud-native development. Check out all our other “What Is” episodes here and be sure to
subscribe to this channel because we’ll be adding more as the year progresses. Thanks for listening!