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To those of us struggling to cope with the challenges of delivering software over the Internet of Things (IoT), DevOps can be the savior.
Delivering software over the Internet is no easy task, and delivering it over the Internet of Things is even more formidable. How do you deliver software to so many “things,” many of which are “loners” unconnected to the rest of the world?
What’s encouraging is that the software management processes and tools that we know and have learned to love still work in the IoT era. In fact, not only do they work, they are essential.
We need teams to work together more smoothly and communicate more quickly to mitigate the higher technological risks. DevOps processes and tools, therefore, are critical in the IoT era because they facilitate smooth, well-oiled collaboration between teams.
A Typical IoT Scenario
Consider a scenario in which you need to develop a “smart” parking system for a “smart” city. The system will involve multiple sensors in the parking lots, a display device in each parking area along with communication equipment, a central server for control and analysis and a smart device in each car.
Drivers can check how many slots are available in nearby parking lots on their automobile devices and navigate to the appropriate parking lot. They also can book slots in advance and start paying from the time they book the slot. When they leave a slot, the parking slot sensor automatically detects that the slot is free and updates a central server. The central server transmits slot availability to the car-based devices, where they become visible to drivers. The central server also generates various kinds of reports and performs various kinds of high-end analysis.
As with any conventional Internet system, there are multiple software components. All of them have their respective delivery (development, testing and deployment) streams. These streams need to work interdependently and collaboratively, and they need centralized configuration management and dashboards.
The Scale and Diversity of IoT
The differences and challenge, however, lie in the sheer scale of deployment, the diversity of deployment environments and the multiple deployment channels. As you can imagine, any large city will have millions of cars, thousands of parking lots and, hence, hundreds of thousands of individual slots. The number of deployment devices easily can run into the millions.
In the interest of preventing monopolies, not all the parking sensors will be from one manufacturer. The same holds for the car-based devices. While certain standards can be enforced, not all manufacturers will adhere to one universal protocol. It will be necessary to allow multiple communication and security protocols on these devices. This multiplicity of protocols can complicate software deployment on the devices.
Other Considerations
What makes the entire deployment process even more complex is the fact that most of the deployment will be done over the air (OTA). Given that OTA deployment is susceptible to radio-frequency interference and other transmission issues, the deployment process must allow for more robustness than conventional wired deployments.
There are even more factors to consider: A city-based system can be extremely dynamic. New cars get registered every day, adding to the traffic. New parking lots may be built every now and then and get integrated into the smart city system. New kinds of chips from new sensor manufacturers could be added, as mentioned earlier, to increase competition. New, more sophisticated car-based devices coming into the market might offer to host the smart parking software. Of course, as in conventional systems, new functionality and patch fixes would be released frequently. Finally, as the system becomes part of city life, its utility as an analytical tool could increase beyond analyzing parking trends to other spheres of activity.
These business and technological factors can exert tremendous evolutionary pressures on the system. A smart system in a smart evolving city must evolve, too. Yet, no change anywhere in the system must be allowed to break the system anywhere else. The chances of this happening are higher in an IoT system because interconnection protocols have not matured enough to become universal and because physical device conditions can never be predicted perfectly. For instance, a single extra field required by the central big data server could place an unsustainable additional burden on the fragile radio-frequency system in the parking lot and bring down the entire data transmission.
How DevOps Can Help
To offset the increase in technological and business risk in the IoT, we need robust processes and tools that mitigate the additional risk by improving communication and collaboration between teams. Tools that have the following features become indispensable:
- A centralized dashboard providing a cross-stream view of the software development;
- The ability to trace linkages between all related software artifacts across streams and lifecycle stages, given the stressful nature of interdependencies between streams; and
- A tool that can detect broken linkages.
The tools also need a well-oiled DevOps management culture that encourages close collaboration and rapid communication between development and operations.
IoT heightens the need for close collaboration between multiple software streams and within streams between development and operations. Adopting a DevOps culture and DevOps enabling tools is the way to offset the risks of software delivery in the Internet of Things.
About the Author / Vidhya V. Kumar
Vidhya is an advisory software engineer at IBM. An evangelist and practitioner of agile methodologies, continuous delivery and documentation, she has about 10 years of experience in the IT industry. She is a subject matter expert in DevOps, application lifecycle management and search methodologies.
