The team that founded the most popular multicloud management platform, Rancher, has launched a new cloud platform called Acorn.

Sheng Liang, Shannon Williams, Darren Shepherd and Will Chan are serial entrepreneurs with an impeccable track record of building successful open-source technology companies.

Before co-founding Acorn Labs, they built Cloud.com, which Citrix acquired in 2012, and Rancher Labs, which was acquired by SUSE, the German open-source software company, in 2020.

Darren Shepherd, the brain behind some of the most widely used open source software, such as K3s, is the architect of the Acorn platform.

Acorn is the next-generation application platform that simplifies the process of deploying and running containerized apps in the cloud. It abstracts the complex DevOps workflow involved in dealing with Kubernetes and managed services available in the public cloud.

Acorn Labs is offering a Sandbox, a free compute environment in the cloud, for anyone with a GitHub account to run, test, and develop apps. There will be a premium flavor, Acorn Pro, which is meant to run applications in production in an AWS region.

Developers define their application and its dependencies in a well-defined, structured format called Acornfile. The dependencies can be other containerized workloads or managed cloud services like Amazon RDS, Amazon S3, and Amazon SQS. The Acorn platform builds the definition into a unified image based on the standard OCI format that can be signed, stored, and pulled from a standard container registry. Since an Acornfile is declarative, it can be easily integrated into existing CI/CD pipelines and GitOps workflows.

Acorn comes with a set of prebuilt services, such as relational databases and NoSQL databases. Developers can easily reference these services in an Acornfile to consume them in their applications without having to provision or configure them separately.

The ability to share Acorn applications through a link makes the platform interesting. Any user who receives a link will have the ability to deploy the Acorn with a single click into a sandbox to try out. Developers gain visibility into the number of times the link has been used to deploy their software over time.

Though Acorn runs on a Kubernetes cluster, the developer doesn’t need to know anything about the underlying infrastructure. Acorn completely abstracts the workflow of creating resources like pods, services, configmaps, secrets, and volumes through a simplified process. Container images are the fundamental deployment units of Acorn. As long as developers include a Dockerfile to build their source code into an image, Acorn can take over the deployment process.

While still in beta, the value proposition of Acorn is compelling. It lets developers and operators treat the cloud as an application runtime without having to deal with the intricacies of identity management, network security, role-based access control and complex configuration. Acorn’s design enables it to become multicloud in the future, which lets developers target any public cloud infrastructure with minimal changes to code and configuration.

Last week, Microsoft released an open-source project called Radius, which is similar to Acorn. Both have the same goal and follow identical design principles. With containerization becoming the de facto standard along with the wide adoption of public cloud, we need new platforms that unify and abstract disparate infrastructures.

Acorn and Radius are examples of next-generation platforms that are fundamentally redefining the way modern applications are deployed and managed.