Wind River Studio Pipelines - Improving Development Efficiency

Improving efficiency is an ongoing goal of pretty much every development team out there: reducing the tedious, manual work so that they can focus on the stuff that creates real value. Wind River Studio Developer was created specifically to enable embedded systems developers to implement DevSecOps practices, and our recent Studio Pipelines release improves efficiency by standardizing and improving the developer experience.

Standardizing the developer experience is one of the most important and impactful parts of any DevSecOps transformation, as we’ve explored in an earlier post.  It is particularly important for intelligent edge projects, given the number of specialty teams, tools, and environments involved.

Bringing Everybody Together for Better Collaboration

Modern projects include embedded hardware, software for embedded systems and applications, connectivity to systems in the cloud, software for the applications and services in the cloud, and supporting functions such as testers, security analysts, data scientists, operations, and maintenance staff.

DevSecOps is all about collaboration, and it’s a very tall order to get all these parts working smoothly together. They all have specialized domain knowledge and tools, and most focus on just one part or aspect of the overall system. But those parts all need to work together, and the development schedule must consider dependencies and handoffs between them.

That’s why Studio Pipelines is based on an open, extensible platform: to provide a foundation upon which the many specialized teams, tools and processes can collaborate. Our latest release includes high-quality integration with best of breed embedded tooling, including Wind River edge and development technologies of course, but also third-party technologies through Studio Gallery. These provide a simple way to add new capabilities and increase collaboration through the Studio Developer platform without disrupting existing processes.

Perhaps more importantly, Studio Pipelines runs on a containerized Kubernetes platform that supports multiple operating systems and environments. It’s not uncommon for a specific tool to run only on Windows or only on Linux. Studio Pipelines enables you to package essentially any tool into a container that provides the right operating environment, and to mix and match containers in a single pipeline. In other words, teams that rely on tools based in different operating systems no longer need to maintain separate infrastructure; Studio Pipelines provides a common place for everybody to collaborate.

Leveraging The Right Tools for the Job

The most important benefit of using an open, extensible platform, though, is probably that it minimizes friction. Lack of adoption has killed many DevOps initiatives, and that can often be traced back to a lack of support for necessary tools or to implementations that are too disruptive. Studio Pipelines avoids both problems, greatly improving adoption.

Our latest release works with virtually any tool, whether it’s built in, comes via single-click installation from Studio Gallery, or a custom container. Developers can use the right tools for the job, that align to their expertise and experience, without worrying about the disruption of replacing other useful tools or migrating to a different operating environment.

Moreover, the use of containerized workloads provides a consistent interface for orchestration and automation throughout the development and application lifecycles. This smooths over differences and inconsistencies between different tools so developers enjoy a seamless, standardized development experience. As needs change and new tools are added to the toolkit, developers can adopt them more easily because they operate in a similar fashion to the tools that they already use.

A Flexible and Composable Approach Increases Reuse

Standardization is great within a project, and it also delivers benefits across projects and teams by improving reuse of development and application components. Projects that share a common hardware platform, for example, can use the same pipeline blocks to build and test the platform software. That lets developers focus on building application software that delivers differentiated value to end users.

But embedded projects are rarely identical; two projects may share a common hardware platform but require different device configurations and related testing changes. Studio Pipelines allows composition of pipelines from blocks at any level of granularity, such that a single block in pipeline A can invoke a single block, multiple blocks or all of pipeline B. Moreover, Studio Pipelines provides persistent storage across a pipeline run so that blocks can use status and state from earlier blocks to operate as efficiently as possible.

By providing a common, standardized platform for collaboration, Studio Pipelines makes it easy to share and reuse tools, code, components, configurations, and resources. This means less time spent reinventing the wheel on different projects, a greater ability to document and share knowledge, and development practices that are more consistent and compliant with organizational policies.

Operationalizing DevSecOps with Embedded Systems

DevSecOps brings significant benefits to development teams, but teams developing for the intelligent edge need to address challenges unique to complex embedded systems. Studio Pipelines helps development teams standardize tools, processes, and the developer experience, resulting in greater efficiency, collaboration, and overall productivity.

Wind River Studio Developer is a full-featured DevOps platform for intelligent edge development, purpose-built to solve the challenges that prevent embedded systems teams from adopting DevSecOps practices. Contact us today to discuss how Wind River Studio Pipelines can help you reduce development costs and accelerate time to market while increasing quality, security, and compliance.

About the author

Jon Jarboe is a Senior Product Marketing Line Manager at Wind River