Boston Limited, which - don't be fooled - is in England - is peddling the world's first commercially available ARM-as-a-Service (AaaS), a cloud service offering engineers remote access to preconfigured systems so they can move their server apps - specifically x86 server apps - to ARM.

The widgetry is based on Calxeda's still 32-bit EnergyCore ARM-based processor technology.

Boston's AaaS platform is supposed to give developers all the tools and services required to port and migrate software to the ARM platform, which promises to be 64-bit around the end of the year.

Boston has teamed with its UK neighbor Ellexus to offer Breeze, software ARM itself uses to profile and troubleshoot applications on its own HPC cluster.

Breeze can trace programs as they run to find file dependencies and environment settings. It offers visibility into the inner workings of complex scripted flows such as those used in semiconductor design or complex software builds.

"We've been working with ARM for 18 months and we are now extremely excited to be partnering up with one of the stand-out frontrunners in the ARM-based server ecosystem, Boston Ltd.," Rosemary Francis, managing director of Ellexus, said in a statement.

"We understand the hardware constraints that many software developers will face in trying to enter the ARM environment and Boston's cloud offering provides a fantastic opportunity for those wanting to future-proof their applications as more and more users move over to ARM technology.

Boston's ARM-based Viridis Microservers are built on ultra-low power System-on-Chips (SOCs) from Calxeda. Boston was the first company to launch server-grade ARM products when the Viridis line came out last year.

Calxeda's VP of marketing Karl Freund claims "There is tremendous demand for easy access to ARM server technology so the time is ripe for AaaS."

Boston says its ‘ARM-as-a-Service' delivers dedicated physical quad-core nodes as opposed to virtual CPUs like most conventional cloud offerings. Users can develop on single nodes or test their app's scaling capabilities across multiple nodes within the cluster. They can choose from varying levels of software, training videos and professional services to assist with their migration.

Check out the video at www.lowpowerservers.com.