Designing for the Intelligent Edge

Introduction

The intelligent edge presents a wide variety of new opportunities and challenges for virtually every industry. Wind River® has been providing advice, tools, and consulting services to the makers of embedded systems for decades. No other organization has a comparable level of depth and breadth in embedded design. Our professional services organization can help you define new opportunities, overcome design challenges, and quickly leverage these emerging technologies into paradigm-breaking products and solutions.

Embedded systems are playing new roles in what the industry has dubbed “the intelligent edge” — devices built on open standards and operating far outside traditional environments. The intelligent edge creates opportunities as well as challenges. Embedded system makers across multiple industries will have to adapt to changes in customer expectations. The Wind River Professional Services organization has the experience to help you navigate this potentially challenging technological shift.

We have been providing advice, tools, and consulting services to makers of embedded systems for decades. We work with embedded systems engineering teams on a variety of missions, including product-focused projects, operations and execution, lifecycle management, board support packages (BSPs), and more. Our Professional Services organization can help you define new opportunities and overcome design challenges. Working together, we can support you in quickly leveraging these emerging technologies into paradigm-breaking products and solutions.

Wind River and Professional Services Overview

Wind River has been a leader in the embedded systems software field for over 35 years. Our technology powers generation after generation of the safest, most secure devices, built by the largest companies around the world. When you set out to build something that must work, you turn to us.

We augment our product offerings with professional services. The Wind River Professional Services team is comprised of experts in the use of our own product portfolio as well as in both project management and embedded software engineering.

We have a long track record of creating custom solutions to solve our customers’ problems by integrating our products with third-party, opensource custom software and hardware. We value deep collaboration, and our role as trusted advisor and partner has proven itself in many customer success stories over the years.

How the Intelligent Edge Is Impacting Embedded Systems

The phrase “intelligent edge” has become overused, often obscuring the simplicity and importance of the paradigm it represents. While it varies greatly in implementation, the intelligent edge is about pushing computing and data management to the periphery of traditional networks and architectures. The compute (intelligence) is no longer in the data center. It’s at the edge, often way outside the normal spaces where you would traditionally expect to find it.

In practical terms, moving the edge also usually means migrating away from proprietary systems. Building for the intelligent edge involves the use of standards-based, open, and interoperable technologies. It may also imply process automation.

The intelligent edge affects the core design and functioning of embedded systems. To work effectively at the intelligent edge, an embedded system must be able to connect more broadly than it did in earlier generations. It has to interact with new types of compute and networks. These include cloud service providers — with a host of enhanced security features that compensate for the increasing openness of the edge.

How Wind River Professional Services Partners with You at the Edge

Our Professional Services organization works side by side with your team. We engage for the full lifecycle. From initial discovery through solution development and long-term support, we partner with you to craft solutions that meet the criteria of the intelligent edge.

Our Process and Approach

If there were one word that could capture the essence of our diverse, deep professional services program, it would be “balance.” Our approach is all about finding the right balance between consulting and mentoring, between the level of detail in requirements and the expected pace of execution and, of course, budget. Part of our strength lies in the assignment of a highly experienced single point of contact for the project, from start to finish.

We focus on aligning requirements with the design process, implementation, and testing. Our teams are rated CMMI-DEV 3. CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration) is a program for process level improvement training and appraisal, administered by the CMMI Institute, a subsidiary of ISACA.

Every Professional Services project starts with a solutions assessment or architecture study. This is typically a small engagement. We gather functional requirements, market requirements, and specifications. From there, we devise an optimal design process and engage in project planning. The goal is to map out a path to the successful realization of a concept.

After the assessment, we proceed to a proof of concept (PoC). In some cases, this might be a minimum viable product (MVP) or a complete architecture study. Either way, the purpose is the same: We want to collaborate on verifying the embedded system’s feasibility as well as your team’s assumptions about usability.

We tend to concentrate on specialized issues, such as improving and optimizing products and processes. We generally do not develop the embedded systems applications ourselves. Rather, our focus is on training and empowering your team to achieve this objective on their own as the process moves from PoC to operationalization and production. Our approach is open and we do not always recommend our own products.

We often modify the scope of the project as we move into the productization and optimization of the PoC or MVP. We oversee coding and schematics along with systems integration, including defect management. There’s a great deal of work to be done in ensuring that the product is safe and secure. We work with you to debug and fix issues, and we provide complete security patching. In the latter workload, we often dig into our connections with first responders and the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) system.

Long-term support is available if necessary. Generally, our approach emphasizes preparing the client to assume complete ownership of the product lifecycle. However, a variety of support options are available to meet a range of organizational needs.

The 7 Design Dynamics at the Intelligent Edge You Should Be Aware Of

Our Professional Services offerings vary and are seldom ever exactly the same from one client to the next. However, they tend to fall into recognizable categories, such as BSPs and certifications. In the case of the intelligent edge, the projects are often a blend of multiple services.

Product-Focused Projects

Many of our projects focus on a specific product, such as VxWorks®, the #1 real-time OS, according to VDC Research. A project-focused project might involve system design, including architecture, design of data flows, and system performance analytics. We get involved in memory usage analysis and driver optimizations. In some cases, our team will assess the impact of a multi-core architecture for a VxWorks use case.

Alternatively, a project may work with other open source code components. With its community inputs and ready-to-go nature, open source software can accelerate time-to-market. The velocity of intelligent edge projects makes open source software a desirable system component in many cases.

Product-focused engagements may also deal with your in-house processes, versus the creation of an actual product. In the case of Wind River Simics®, our Professional Services team helps establish a role for this simulation tool in your development and testing workflows. Our approach could include developing metrics and analytics for your Simics project or jointly building models to meet your roadmap needs. We often engage in “fault injection,” transferring knowledge to your team with hands-on fault building to test in Simics. These are just a few of the many potential variants in our product-focused project portfolio.

Assessments

The questions “Where do we stand?” and “What’s the best path forward?” can be difficult to answer, even for highly experienced embedded systems teams. The world has changed. Building devices that work at the intelligent edge means thinking differently about most, if not all, aspects of an embedded system’s design and functionality. Our assessments can help you work through new and unfamiliar parameters.

For example, we can collaborate in the investigating and architecting of solutions. We can jointly explore ways to effectively tune software performance for your unique hardware requirements. This might involve an evaluation of whether bare metal or virtual machines will provide the best solution for your security, deployment, maintenance, and performance needs. We can examine ways to increase system reliability, redundancy, maintainability, and so forth.

Operations, Execution, and Integration

We are doers. When our clients need help with project execution, we get to work. We are able to conduct architecture requirements gathering. We can design systems and then test them. Our Professional Services team can also manage projects from start to finish.

System integration is another capability. We have extensive experience connecting embedded systems to other platforms. Or our work might mean coordinating with a third-party system integrator to ensure that they are meeting requirements and project-related expectations.

Lifecycle Management

Our Professional Services organization has experience supporting embedded systems as they age. Lifecycle management is a constant in the world of devices, though it’s gotten more complicated with the advent of the intelligent edge. Embedded systems are more widely integrated, and they have more processing and data management functions built in. These factors affect the product lifecycle.

One lifecycle management issue we see today has to do with the maintenance of a “frozen branch.” As new generations of devices adapt to new intelligent edge requirements, it is often still necessary to maintain earlier versions of an embedded system — a branch of the development tree that’s frozen, so to speak. In this type of engagement, we might be maintaining older VxWorks code for a particular board, fixing bugs, and installing security patches on the reference hardware. This continues until the system reaches end-of-life.

Security

Security measures have always been part of the embedded systems engineering process. However, in today’s market, device makers face pressure from customers, certification, and standards bodies to make their products more secure. This is due to the vast attack surface that Internet-connected embedded systems present to malicious actors. Embedded systems have become network endpoints that are vulnerable to compromise, exposing users to significant risks.

We have developed a complete methodology to help your engineering team assess and protect its digital assets. It’s based on the industry-standard “CIA Triad” of confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Taking a systematic approach, we facilitate confidentiality by advising on privacy and separation of dev, test, and production environments along with key management. Our services for integrity stress boot processes and data integrity measures. For availability, we focus on allowlisting, countermeasures, and intrusion management.

Where relevant, our security services offerings draw upon our experience with security regulations such as the Common Criteria/FIPS 140- 2, SP 800-53/82/117/147, NERC CIP, ISA99, Wurldtech Achilles, and IEC 62443. We engage in continuous threat monitoring and maintain an active role in worldwide threat intelligence efforts. As we become aware of CVEs that affect our products, we continually notify users and issue updates to remediate any risk exposure.

Certification

Achieving certification for a new embedded system, or recertifying one, can present unique challenges to a product development team. Our Professional Services team is able to supplement in-house knowledge and provide the expertise required to gain certification on a timely basis.

We recently helped an EMEA-based maker of pipeline valve controllers get a product certified for the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) 61508 standard. This project, one of the dozens like it, leveraged our knowledge of VxWorks along with our deep experience with the IEC’s expectations for device design and deployment. We have comparable insights into DO-178B, Def Stan 0056, and many others.

A certification project goes beyond the basics of meeting the needs of the certifying body. We almost always engage with you to make certification part of a broader assessment process. We work with your team to evaluate future plans and current pain points in your organization. We offer a qualitative assessment that shows how you can make meaningful improvements in cost, schedule, and quality — along with a suggested plan for implementation

Board Support Packages (BSPs)

Many clients come to us needing support for circuit boards. A variety of needs arise from a new board, some requiring specialized attention. For example, our BSPs may include the development of device drivers for custom hardware. We can advise on the use of direct access ports or pseudo port drivers, depending on the client’s use case.

Other issues common to BSP engagements relate to system initialization processes, kernel virtualization, memory space allocation, caching, and so forth. These are areas of embedded system development that tend to be beyond the skillsets of most development teams. We can help, providing expertise in these specialized subjects. As the board comes to life in an embedded system, we are able to follow through with testing and lifecycle support.

Managed Services and Wind River Support Packages

We often leave a client team to manage on its own after an engagement, when we are sure they are in good shape. In some cases, however, the client wants us to stay with the project. We offer a variety of support services and managed services for these situations. Some are short term, while others are long term or even permanent.

Managing binary releases is one example of the kind of support services we can provide. In this case, we maintain custom Wind River Linux or VxWorks code for a customer and release fully tested binary images ready for deployment. We can support custom software and hardware when necessary. We can also perform bug fixes and security patch monitoring. In a fully managed service, we take care of the client’s code throughout the entire product lifecycle.

The Soon-to-Be-Here Future of Embedded Systems at the Intelligent Edge

The current work we are doing at the intelligent edge represents what is likely to be the earliest stage in a long cycle of technological advancement. As 5G networks come online, there will be a huge increase in the amount of data traveling on wireless networks. Much of the traffic will involve embedded systems. This will lead to jumps in data management and analytics capabilities at the edge or in the cloud. Many functional changes are coming to embedded systems as the intelligent edge becomes a major segment of the market.

Conclusion

The work of building embedded systems never stops changing. Today, with the advent of the intelligent edge, embedded systems engineering teams are being challenged as never before. Our Professional Services organization partners with you for success in the intelligent edge and across the entire embedded systems space. With decades of experience, we can guide your team in product-based projects, BSPs, security advisory, and beyond. Our approach to professional services is based on mentorship. If your team comes out of the engagement with new competencies, we consider that a win.

As a result of these trends, we expect our Professional Services organization to be involved in many edge-related projects. These will include over-the-air firmware updating, containers, orchestration, virtual machines at the edge, and more. We will probably be working with more AI solutions at the edge as well. The 5G edge will be so complex that human beings alone will not be able to manage it without the use of machine intelligence. The upcoming challenges will be significant, but we are prepared to meet them.

In situations where you need more long-term support, we can deliver managed services and a variety of support packages. The intelligent edge requires rethinking many of the traditional, proprietary architectural modes of embedded systems. As we have demonstrated with clients such as Exxon Mobil, our experience gives us insights into the optimal solutions to complex embedded systems challenges.