EmbedOps: The Future of DevOps for Embedded Firmware

March 08, 2023

Blog

Learn how the EmbedOps platform by Dojo Five is revolutionizing embedded software teams through centrally managed build environments and so much more.

Summary:

• Embedded software teams haven’t reaped all the benefits from advancements in modern software development build and test environments
• EmbedOps allows embedded software teams to capitalize on these advantages by simplifying and streamlining their project workflow via:
  • Centrally Managed Build Environments
  • Templates and predefined Docker containers
  • Simplified interactions with build environments
  • CI system integration
  • Ongoing support services

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In the past decade, software development has evolved at a breakneck pace. Nowadays, it is essential for teams to have continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) services in order to collaborate effectively on complex web applications. In addition, dependency management across all environments has been historically difficult–but modern containerization technologies such as Docker now provide reliable solutions that ensure consistency throughout each stage of development. Investing in these necessary tools provides undeniable value for any technology team looking towards success.

Modern development techniques, methodologies, and tooling have delivered impressive improvements in overall product quality, developer productivity, and numerous other areas across for software development teams. These advances have made complex projects with a large number of contributors, components, and services easier to deploy and manage, while enabling teams to deliver value to customers faster than ever before.

Adapting Software Development Advancements To Embedded Software Teams

These powerful advances in web and native platform (Linux, Windows, mobile) software development verticals have, for the most part, passed the embedded software community by. While improving development operations (DevOps) is now imperative for many modern embedded software development teams; the tools, techniques, and methodologies that have worked so well for the web have been slow to adapt to the unique challenges facing embedded software teams.

Dojo Five has revolutionized the embedded software game with their EmbedOps platform, freeing engineering teams to benefit from the same DevOps advancements enjoyed by web and native app developers. This new approach opens up a world of contemporary possibilities for projects. Building upon decades of industry advancements, this powerful tool allows users to stay up-to-date with modern development environments and operational improvements that can help make any project more efficient than ever before.

What is EmbedOps?

EmbedOps is an embedded firmware lifecycle management system that contains tools and services for development operations that cater specifically to embedded software teams.

EmbedOps simplifies embedded software teams’ workflows by offering: 

Centrally Managed Build Environments  

The first area of focus for the EmbedOps product and services offering, is ensuring that all developers and automation environments on a given project are able to construct build environments with the correct dependencies, consistently across the team, as well as through to their production build environment. This means that all of the build dependencies (e.g. compilers, analysis tools, test frameworks, etc.) are managed and deployed from a “single source of truth” making the environment easily reproducible to any user or process on the project. The pain threshold to keep development environments consistent and synchronized across a project can be as few as three developers. The level of complexity and time required to construct and keep build and test environments consistent rises quickly as the number of team members and steps in the lifecycle scales.

Having centrally managed build and test environments offers a number of advantages, including:

• Reducing developer onboarding to minutes, not hours
• Eliminating issues caused by inconsistencies across environments–we’ve all heard the infamous, “Hey, it builds fine on my system . . .”
• Enabling automation with modern CI systems.
• Tracking and capturing build configurations and dependencies easily–ensuring any given build or test environment can be reproduced quickly.

Web & Command-line Tools

EmbedOps provides web and command-line tools that make setting up and working with builds smooth and simple.

The EmbedOps Command Line Interface (CLI) integrates directly with your automated CI pipelines allowing any developer to run any step in the production CI pipeline exactly as it would be run on the production CI server. See “Embedded Command Line Interfaces Will Change Your Life”

Pre-defined Templates

Get access to a number of pre-defined Docker containers for all of your build dependencies including compilers, test tools, and other code quality tools. These containers enable you to construct or reproduce development environments quickly and reliably.

We offer a number of pre-built containers through our Docker registry and continue to add new containers to expand our footprint of supported compilation code quality and testing environments.

CI System Integration

EmbedOps is designed to be tool-agnostic–allowing your team to use whichever CI system you prefer. It’s most commonly integrated with Bitbucket, GitHub Actions, GitLab, and Azure.

Simple Interaction With The Build Environment

The EmbedOps CLI is built on Python, which enables simple interaction with the build system. This allows your team to interact with the build environment without having to learn Docker and CI systems and eliminates the need to define the same process in multiple places.

Related: Testing Python Scripts in a Docker Container

Reporting Interface

EmbedOps Web automatically captures information about software builds that may be relevant to embedded developers such as memory planning and usage over time.

Ongoing Support Services

In addition to the setup, training, and maintenance of your environment, Dojo Five can also:

• Create the Docker containers for the components of your stack that may not be available through our container registry. Note, that this assumes that your micro vendor and other tool vendors have compilers and tools that support a containerized environment.
• Create integrations to CI systems that we don’t already support (Github Actions, GitLab, Bitbucket are already integrated)
• Integrate with unit testing frameworks like Google Testing and Ceedling.

Read More: EmbedOps FAQs

In Summary: EmbedOps Addresses DevOps Gaps

In a rapidly evolving software development market, teams focused on embedded technologies are not benefiting from the same advancements as web and native platform developers.

Dojo Five's EmbedOps is addressing this issue by providing tools, integrations, and services that allow embedded teams to take full advantage of contemporary developer tools and advancements. The result is a modern approach to building, testing, deploying, and maintaining their embedded software projects--improving quality, increasing productivity and reducing time-to-market.

Could your embedded team benefit from fully automated, end-to-end, build and test pipelines? Contact Dojo Five to learn more!

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Thomas Dever, VP of Product--Dojo Five --
Tom is a technology entrepreneur with more than 30 years of industry experience with companies including Nimbelink (now Airgain), Exosite, and Intel. He founded Memory Views in 2018 and has focused his career on forming high performance teams and growing startups to be investable businesses. Tom is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin--Madison.