The focus towards enabling enhanced connectivity in IoT interfaces have led to the evolution of industry benchmarks, such as Bluetooth 4.2 (BLE with IPV6 readiness), 6LoWPAN (IPv6 over Low power Wireless Personal Area Networks), ZigBee 3.0 based on IEEE802.15.4, Z-Wave Alliance ZAD12837 / ITU-T G.9959, Google Thread and more.
IoT standardization is important from the following standpoints:
- Security concerns: Researchers recently showed how easy it was to exploit ZigBee security loopholes to hack into smart homes to disable Philips light bulbs, smart locking systems and HVAC systems. The notable Dyn cyber-attack which led to the partial shutdown of the Internet was in fact, the handiwork of amateurs. Industry observers agree that the evolution of IoT security standards will pave the way for greater customer confidence in coming few years.
- Faster development cycle: IoT standards are essential in achieving cross-collaboration between product teams working on different IoT devices, and therefore, faster development of new solutions and offerings.
In order to achieve speedy development, ongoing focus in industry stems towards increasing adoption of connectivity solutions coupled with integration with various edge devices. The latest DevOps methodology along with cloud enablement have in the last few months, accelerated the development of effective IoT solutions beyond the boundaries of industries and geographies.
Why DevOps is Useful in Industrial IoT
Industrial IoT is entirely different from consumer IoT as there are millions of live devices, including the mission-critical or safety-critical devices working in the harsh environment that need to be monitored 24/7. To achieve these goals, secure implementation, device performance, accuracy and data analytics plays a crucial role. Safety is of paramount importance in Industrial IOT and devices need to be compliant with Safety Integrity Level standards (SIL) for development.
Continuous remote monitoring of live field devices can also help with predictive maintenance like battery replacement, device health monitoring, functional alerts, production monitoring and environment testing. Also, program interdependencies can be resolved much faster owing to early feedback and resolution of dependencies.
DevOps can help in automating the build verification testing process with continuous integration and deployment in an incremental manner. The entire development lifecycle can be broken down into stages with incremental design, coding, integration, testing, delivery and monitoring rather than a traditional release-based delivery model. The feedback from deployment can be fed back early to the design team for bug fixing not only for the current release, but also as a guideline for future incremental releases. This results in faster, flexible and efficient development coupled with early feedback from deployment teams. This makes DevOps in IIoT a great value addition as it helps achieve the continuous adoption of dynamic conditions and requirements in IIoT without adding much to the expense.
The overall aim of DevOps in IIoT is to achieve savings in efforts and cost while uplifting the overall quality with faster time-to-market.
In Conclusion
Intertwining DevOps Services with IIoT world addresses real world challenges of IoT implementation, including minimal downtime, building safety-critical applications, delayed response time, and rapid adoption of ever-changing/upgrading systems.
eInfochips offers DevOps expertise, delivering faster time to value/market, improved code quality, operational scalability and cost savings through reduced outages/release efforts. It leverages the company’s extensive experience in agile, lean, device, and cloud deployments. Check out our whitepaper on how DevOps is suited for the IoT environment.
