One of the central characteristics of the embedded systems world is the extended development cycles and the structured workflows. This approach has a few disadvantages: it takes a long time to launch products to the market, the costs are higher and customers might lose interest.
By adopting and integrating DevOps practices, the industry can transform all the stages of embedded systems, from development to maintenance. Companies like Siemens, General Electric and Bosch have been integrating these practices in their areas, and they’re leaders in innovation and efficiency. In fact, research shows that by 2025, 85% of organizations will adopt a cloud computing strategy.
One of the most important benefits of taking DevOps practices into developing embedded systems is this stage, the development stage, accelerates. Engineers get to test and launch new things to the market a lot faster than before. The time it takes to bring an idea into reality shortens, and the industry becomes more efficient.
Another aspect to consider is the fact that generally speaking, embedded systems often have to work in critical environments. A failure can have disastrous consequences, depending on the area, so having quality materials and controlling the entire process is fundamental for things to work. Two DevOps practices help in this scenario: continuous integration (CI) and continuous testing (CT).
By applying these two principles to every stage of the development process, companies ensure the quality of their products for every situation. Only the most reliable code can go to the next stage.
Traditionally, there are two teams when it comes to developing embedded systems: one for hardware and one for software. They work separately, but as we said before, this creates communication issues. In DevOps practices, teams communicate with each other every step of the way. As a result, problems are solved faster and everyone works for the same goals.
Achieving scalability and flexibility in the embedded systems industry
The global DevOps market is predicted to reach $24.71 billion by 2027. When a company integrates DevOps principles and practices into their projects, they need to consider how to scale them and how flexible they will be, but they know what they’re doing.
The embedded systems landscape has a wide range of applications, from small IoT devices to entire industrial systems. DevOps principles can be a useful ally if you need to manage this kind of diversity through tools like Docker and Kubernetes.
Development teams can create consistent environments that accompany the project in all its different stages. In production environments, the code can be tested over and over, even in the preliminary instances.
The matter of resources is also something to highlight. Resources are finite, and many projects fail to calculate the cost of the final product. By applying DevOps principles, the company can make more intelligent use of their resources, both the humans and the tools. Certain tasks are prone to mistakes, especially when they’re repetitive.
Automation, then, becomes an important part of the project. People can free some of their time to solve problems that a machine cannot tackle effectively. If you pair this with cloud resources and automated infrastructure management, you get a reduction in operational costs and better scalability. This translates to saving money in costs and effective project management.
Finally, we need to tackle the matter of improvement and innovation. This is the key to DevOps practices: there’s always room to be better. Teams working on an embedded systems project can always find new ways to enhance performance, deliver new features and reduce costs. With technology evolving at the pace it does, it’s important to remain competitive in the market.
Adopting and integrating DevOps practices in embedded systems means taking advantage of all the benefits these principles offer. From better collaboration, to constant improvement, to effective resource management.
The scale and complexity of these projects grow, and that’s when we need effective practices to innovate in the industry. With a DevOps approach, these challenges are tackled in the best possible way.