A game streaming platform
on Arm and x86

Deliver advanced gaming experiences to any device

Streaming from the cloud is emerging as a channel for direct game distribution. However, the economics of game streaming solutions are challenging. Anbox Cloud is a highly scalable platform for game streaming with an attractive cost to performance ratio.

Video games were traditionally enjoyed on sophisticated game consoles or expensive desktop PCs. Increasingly, gaming experiences are becoming mobile, spontaneous and casual. This change is driven by the proliferation of smartphones, broadband internet access and the cloud.

With the cloud providing a high-performance and scalable computing backend for games, video streaming is emerging as an attractive distribution channel. Game streaming from the cloud does away with expensive devices. Gamers can play games hosted in the cloud on any smartphone, laptop or tablet with an identical experience as more expensive consoles.

Cloud games for Android

With over three million apps, the Android operating system has the most extensive inventory of games with one of the largest existing ecosystems of developers. Running Android games in the cloud, and delivering them via streaming, levels the playing field for hardware. There is no need for the latest and greatest smartphones to be able to enjoy the most exciting gaming experiences. Rich graphical rendering becomes accessible even to low end smartphones. Game discovery becomes simple, with a Netflix-like experience. Gamers play on demand, on the go, with less battery drain than ever.

What does it take to realise this vision? As one can imagine, this would first and foremost require scalable virtualisation capabilities for Android in the cloud. Furthermore, virtualisation should occur in a way that supports hardware acceleration for high-quality and high-speed video encoding for streaming purposes. Finally, for commercial-grade deployments, manageability, reliability and security will be required. The key challenges are:

  • High density for attractive unit economics
  • Software automation for low cost operations
  • Commercial-grade support for reliability

Anbox Cloud is engineered to address these challenges. The commercially supported platform builds on open source software to empower innovators to stream Android games at scale in the cloud.

A scalable infrastructure for game streaming

Games Arm and x86 servers

Anbox Cloud is hardware agnostic. Run Android games natively on ARM servers from Ampere in the cloud. Alternatively, take advantage of the newest generations of x86 processors from Intel or AMD.

Simultaneous sessions at scale

Simultaneous gaming sessions can run very densely on a single server with Anbox Cloud. This approach containerises Android fully, with the low overhead and the manageability of Linux containers.

Host on private and public clouds

Anbox Cloud enables you to deploy your gaming closer to your customers. Deploy in you a target region on your favorite cloud, or on your very own infrastructure at the edge.

Leverage GPUs and GPGPUs

Anbox Cloud leverages hardware acceleration rich graphical rendering, animations and effects. The platform also enables high-quality video encoding and streaming.

What's under the hood

Anbox Cloud builds on a powerful stack of open-source software to deliver Android game streaming from the cloud.

Android in containers

Unlike Android emulators that make use of virtual machines, Anbox Cloud leverages system containers through LXD, the next generation system container manager. It offers a user experience similar to virtual machines but using lightweight Linux containers instead manageable via a REST API. It also exposes GPUs through a passthrough. You will therefore take advantage of any hardware accelerators to deliver rich mobile experiences.

Software orchestration

Streaming Android apps to thousands of mobile and desktop clients simultaneously requires orchestration and monitoring of several software components. This involves streaming servers, image repositories, applications, a dashboard application for management and more. Thanks to Juju and MAAS, you can deploy your stack automatically anywhere.

Stream Android games

Get in touch with Canonical to explore avenues to deliver your games to millions via cloud streaming.

Get in touch