Wind River is fostering the adoption of DevOps processes for embedded systems by making available a continuous delivery (CD) platform that its customers can download.
Glenn Seiler, vice president for open source strategy for Wind River, said the CD platform is based on an open source instance of the Jenkins continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform. The company envisions organizations downloading the platform as source code that Wind River will update regularly for use on top of the Wind River Linux platform, he said.
Wind River is taking advantage of containers, Kubernetes, the Puppet IT automation framework and a repository to ease deployment of its CD platform, added Seiler. The company is committed to providing updates to that platform, which Wind River uses internally, at least every three weeks, said Seiler.
Wind River expects most organizations will already have some form of a CI process in place. The CD platform provided by Wind River will focus on accelerating the delivery of applications built using whatever CI process organizations have in place today, said Seiler.
In the embedded systems space, Seiler said the adoption of best DevOps practices is still in its very early days. However, with the rise of edge computing and the internet of things (IoT), organizations will need to find a way to securely deploy and update highly distributed application environments. To achieve that goal, many organizations will apply the same DevOps principles enterprise companies have been applying to their embedded systems, he said.
To ensure the integrity of the software supply chain on which the Wind River CD platform is delivered, Wind River has also been certified under the ISO 9001:2015 specification for management processes, as well as the OpenChain specification for open source compliance.
Wind River also has the Wind River Workbench for Linux LTS, based on the Eclipse integrated development environment (IDE), along with various system analysis tools including a trace visualization tool from Percepio AB to identify the root cause of anomalies.
While it’s taken more than 10 years to drive the adoption of best DevOps practices in the enterprise, adoption in embedded systems environments should be faster now that the journey has begun. Organizations of all sizes are pushing more application workloads to the edge at faster rates. Traditional approaches to building and deploying applications on standalone embedded systems will not be able to keep pace. Organizations that build applications for embedded systems will be challenged by first acquiring the right tools and then adapting their internal culture to the complexities that arise when they need to build and deploy applications faster.
Wind River is making the case for a curated open source CD platform that should enable organizations to spend less time on managing the underlying DevOps platform in favor of focusing more time and energy on changing their internal culture.
