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What Is DevOps and Its Importance in Software Development

DevOps is a connection of development and operations that helps improve the development process and make it much faster using special tools and processes. Traditionally there are two teams: a development team and an operations team. At first a development team comes on working. It builds and releases the code. After that an operation team works on deployment, managing and balancing its work. They also look for possible problems and tell the development team to fix them. Most likely you can imagine how long these steps took to come to the result. So a concept of DevOps appeared. 

In such a way now you can have both developmental and operational specialists in one team. It is like two teams with deep connection with each other and perfectly managed communication. It makes the whole process much faster and more effective. Moreover, it represents an ideal connection of speed and quality with all automated tools that it uses. 

DevOps is already widely used in software development, where there are so many moments to be controlled and managed. And it can be samely perfectly used in embedded development. DevOps for embedded systems can bring necessary speed and accuracy. Embedded DevOps have several practices that make the development process faster with greater quality and efficiency. These practices include automated compilation, self-checking simulations, hardware in the loop testing, automated deployments.

So DevOps for embedded development may be a good solution if you want to increase its productivity and get perfect quality. To achieve it you can use various types of embedded DevOps that include continuous integration, continuous deployment, continuous delivery, configuration management, continuous monitoring. 

Types of Embedded DevOps

Let’s talk more about the types of DevOps you can use for embedded development. We will take a precise look at three main types: continuous integration (CI), continuous delivery (CD), and continuous deployment (CD). 

  1. Continuous Integration (CI). It is a practice that helps to build better communication within the team and increase the quality of the development. It implies that the development team regularly checks the code changes in the repository while CI automatically builds and tests the code. 

Due to Continuous Integration it is easy to detect possible issues fastly while they are at the early stage to fix them. With this practice it is also possible to integrate changes into the shared trunk to make the all points more visible for all developers. 

It is a first step in the whole continuous process of development. So at this stage you can benefit from automated code checking and integration to fix mistakes faster. But all next steps should be made manually, which is a disadvantage. 

It is successfully used for the embedded IoT solutions.

  1. Continuous Delivery (CD). It is the next step of the continuous process. It means the deployment of all code changes that appeared within the Continuous Integration process. This practice implies a manual deployment. So if the codebase passes the quality control it can be passed for the deployment. 

Due to this practice developers can build, practice and deploy codes faster which significantly raises their productivity. Besides that it helps to minimize failure risk during the process of production. So generally it helps to deliver products continuously and without mistakes, unlike the manual process that causes a lot of unreliable releases that leads to delays and mistakes.

It can be used for the microcontroller firmware development, for example, for the washing machines.

  1. Continuous Deployment (CD). It is a next step of a continuous process, which implies an automated deployment. So there are no manual forces for the deployment needed. Continuous Deployment needs a totally automated process to release changes from the repository to production without the need from the developer’s side to approve each deployment. So it depends a lot from the well established Integration and Delivery. 

Here such tools can be used as Harness, Spinnaker, Chef, Jenkins, Ansible, Puppet to help embedded team DevOps establish automated pipelines for the deployment without any human intervention. 

The main benefit of this type is that the whole process is automated so that there is no place for the human factor and possible mistakes connected with it. So that you can release the products consistently keeping a high quality level. 

It is used for the embedded firmware design services.

Looking For Embedded DevOps

So probably now you understand that collaboration between developers and operations teams is a super important step that can influence the process of development a lot making it faster and more efficient. It is all due to the automated system that helps to avoid most of the mistakes or fix them quickly. 

And if you wanna to find an IoT embedded developer or embedded security engineer for your project it would be great to know more about the skills and expertise required for embedded DevOps. So we prepared a list of them for you:

  • Knowledge of embedded systems
  • Knowledge and skills in software development
  • Skills in using of DevOps tools and practices

How to Build and Manage an Effective Embedded DevOps Team

Most likely you may need a whole team for your software embedded development or microcontroller development. But it may be difficult to build and control a team. So here are our tips on how to do this effectively and get a productive team.

  1. Find team members with similar values and expertise.
  2. Explain the task as understandable as possible and make sure that it is realistic for your team.
  3. Motivate your team to go ahead in their expertise.
  4. Make some team-building practices to ensure a comfortable communication within the team.
  5. Try to be attentive to your team members and support them.
  6. Hear your team members and meet them halfway.

Embedded DevOps for the Business

So DevOps in embedded development can be successfully used to improve the efficiency, reliability, and security of the embedded systems. Due to the continuous process it makes all the development faster and with less number of errors. CI and CD can ensure a process of continuous automated integration and deployment of the products with minimum of mistakes. It is a pipeline that automates the delivery process of creating code, testing and deploying it.  

So your business can benefit a lot from its supply, for example, for the IoT embedded security. It is a new approach to ensure high speed and quality of the development. Hence you can increase the productivity, reduce cost of the production and remain competitive at the market. 

Want to improve your business with the help of embedded DevOps? Contact us and get professional help right now!

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