Delighting your customer is a top priority. Analytics gives your user contextual insight highlighting the value of your B2B SaaS solution. Many use-cases exist from energy/utilities to logistics, from e-learning to healthcare, from asset management to workforce optimization limited only by your imagination. Analytics, embedded as part of your SaaS solution, is an opportunity to meet your customer where they are on their journey and enrich their experience with your analytics.

From providing sales data and tracking customer retention, monitoring supply chain and other processes to managing people/equipment and other asset/resourcing usage and many more use-cases, this should be deployable quickly, embeddable inside web-based applications, deployable anywhere (including on-premise) at scale and without users needing to learn how to become data scientists…ideally no prior experience, expertise or training needed.

Benefits of C1/CD and Devops for Embedded Software

– Streamlined development workflow
– Automation of key tasks such as building, testing, and deployment 
– Optimization of resources
– Enhanced collaboration between teams
– Reduction in time-to-market

Consolidation of Legacy Single-Core Systems

Expected Benefits:

– Solve Hardware Obsolescence
– Reduces Space, Weight, Power and Cabling (SWap-C)
– Reduces BOM costs
– Move to an IMA (Integrated Modular Avionics) approach to aggregate applications with different lifecycle, for example

Possible Constraints to be Managed for Consolidation:

– Legacy OS and associated applications coming from different equipment
– Can be heterogeneous (OS, OS version, Different Standard Conformance, ect)
– Mixed-Criticality may exist (Partitioning may then need to be demonstrated)

KEEPING THE FOCUS ON INNOVATION

It’s a common challenge for network equipment companies: The pri- ority is creating breakthrough innovations, not supporting and main- taining legacy software on deployed equipment. But the unfortunate consequence, all too often, is a buildup of technical debt, higher security risks, and unstable software platforms.

In the case of one long-term Wind River® customer, a network equip- ment and solutions provider known globally for its advances in auto- mated, cloud-accessible networks, the laser focus on innovation meant routine maintenance of its Yocto Project Linux platform took a back seat. With service level agreements in place with the end customer, the development team realized late in the game that it couldn’t deploy new software until all critical security risks in the OS were found and fixed.

Secure Development Lifecycle

Wind River supports a secure development lifecyle (SDL) across our products that is enforced by policy and implemented with standards, processes, and procedures. The SDL is aligned directly with the NIST 800-218 Standard and its principles: prepare the organization, protect the software, produce well-secured software, and respond to vulnerabilities.

The SDL is tightly integrated with our product development lifecycle (PDLC), and it is deployed across our enterprise and assessed regularly for conformance and assurance to customers of our trusted products.

Wind River Secure Development Lifecycle

With the ongoing menace of bad actors threatening national security, corporate data, and valuable intellectual property, the need for secure software development has never been more critical. The recent Presidential Executive Order 14028 outlining the implementation of secure software supply chains has set a new standard for ensuring the integrity and safety of digital products. At the heart of this initiative is the Secure Software Development Framework (SSDF), provided by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Special Publication (SP) 800-218.

To operate effectively, these devices all require varying degrees of security, safe- ty, and reliability. Whether your system requirements are mission critical, high security, long lasting, cost sensitive, customized, or off the shelf, your embedded devices need to keep up with rigid constraints.

A device designer faces many choices when determining how to architect an em- bedded solution. The Linux operating system offers faster innovation with artifi- cial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, high levels of security, standards that are common across all industries, flexibility and adaptability for many use cases, and cloud-native and DevOps support. But it doesn’t come without challenges.

Many avionics systems have been successfully developed using custom hardware and software. However, over the last decade, the full lifecycle costs of customized systems have forced original equip- ment manufacturers (OEMs) to consider the use of COTS-based systems. At the same time, there has been a noticeable migration away from federated architectures, where each individual subsystem performs a dedicated function, toward generic computing platforms that can be used in multiple types of applications and, in some cases, can run multiple applications concurrently. 

Complementary technologies have spurred these changes. Such technologies have been driven by the growing adoption of edge computing, autonomous vehicles, medical devices for remote diagnosis and treatment, robotics, aerospace advances, and increasing 5G technology demands as mobile broadband and mmWave microcell installations proliferate.

Adopting cloud-native tools for development empowers teams to collaborate from around the world. Containers make this possible by sharing a common environment with reusable configurations for developing and deploying code. One of the advantages of using containers is that they can be adopted for both existing embedded applications and for new designs. Application developers, whether creating embedded or enterprise-focused programs, can deploy software written in Rust and Python using tools familiar to them. Think of it as a write-once, deploy-anywhere approach.