IoT is continuing to transform homes, cities, and industries by interconnecting millions of distributed devices, which form crucial data collection points that help with real-time, automated decision making. However, as this network expands, managing it becomes a quagmire for the development and operations teams. But DevOps practices simplify management, and we’ll look at how these principles impact IoT and their benefits to the entire ecosystem.

Challenges of a Distributed IoT System

IoT requires software for both data collection and controlling the attached hardware in a broadly distributed system. Developing products and software to handle these functions presents the following challenges:

• Hardware configurations: This software needs to feature hardware configurations, which are difficult to do manually on each device.
• Pushing new features to existing products: Enriching existing products requires quick innovation cycles and iterations, which can be difficult to achieve if teams don’t work in synergy.
• Synchronizing software and firmware updates: These updates are usually developed using different teams, and coordinating them to optimize these updates to provide the latest features and security patches is not easy.
• Providing enough storage for real-time data collection: IoT devices generate a lot of data, and a key challenge is managing this data effectively and in real-time. Solutions need to have scalable storage solutions to ensure systems serve clients effectively for quick decision making.
• Implementing alarm and security standards: IoT devices need strong security features that include automated alerting and monitoring to ensure compliance with industry standards and prevent breaches.
• Software scaling: Scaling can be slow and inconsistent across large, distributed IoT networks because of deployment challenges.
• Expensive bug fixing: Once software and firmware are developed and deployed, bugs can be expensive to identify and fix in the distributed system.

Why DevOps is Critical for IoT

Since IoT end nodes are usually deployed in hard-to-reach areas, especially in industrial, city, and transportation use cases, it is almost impossible for physical monitoring, updating, and maintenance at scale because it takes a lot of time. But DevOps practices integrate the development and operations teams in IoT service providing organizations, enabling teams to streamline operations using practices like CI/CD pipelines and automated testing to hasten the processes. Here’s how.

Quick Development Cycles

Once the hardware and cabling is installed, the applications running the show must evolve quickly with time to serve changing business needs. This means continuous software updates that happen quickly, and DevOps enables this by allowing quick microservices development, testing, and deployment to the real-world environment.

Remote Management

With millions of connected devices, IoT developers need a mechanism to push updates, configuration changes, and patches remotely and automatically. DevOps enables teams to remotely and automatically develop and apply these changes without causing significant downtimes. DevOps also enables rollbacks to previous versions just in case the updates cause malfunctions.

Continuous Testing and Monitoring

DevOps provides means to continuously test applications thoroughly before deployment and monitor them continuously after production to ensure issues are resolved quickly. Continuous monitoring is particularly critical for healthcare, industrial automation, and transportation applications, where failure or misbehavior can have dire consequences.

Reliable Scalability

As the software running IoT devices and networks grows and becomes more complex, developing additional code to fix issues or improve data collection becomes a challenge even to experienced developers. However, DevOps simplifies software development by enabling microservice development and improvement at a time, which is a more reliable method towards simplifying otherwise complex scalability.

Data and System Security

DevOps, and DevSecOps by extension, implements tight security measures by default, including when declaring infrastructure as code and using agents. These help to safeguard data security and comply with industry standards.

Key DevOps Practices That Are Critical for IoT

The key DevOps practices that simplify IoT development, scaling, and automation include:

Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)

The CI pipeline handles the merging and testing of code after developers push changes into the central repository. On the other hand, the CD pipeline automates the deployment of these builds into production, which is in the remote IoT devices in this case.

With these two automated pipelines in place, organizations are able to:

• Quickly develop and deploy new features
• Ensure the new updates are tested, secure, and capable of handling the traffic before deployment
• Minimize or eliminate downtime in the data collection and processing tasks
• Rollback updates automatically if they fail

Microservices and Containers

Microservices simplify software development because they allow teams to focus on building and improving one aspect of the software at a time. On the other hand, Containers enable portability by allowing microservices and their dependencies to be used across multiple environments. Combined, these two practices enable rapid iteration and deployment of new features without interfering with other parts of the system, as well as efficient resource usage.

Infrastructure as Code

IoT relies heavily on hardware, and perhaps the biggest advantage DevOps provides to this industry is IaC. Basically, it is possible to do hardware provisioning as code, such as allocating compute power, databases, networks, servers, and cloud services using commands. So as new microservices and containers are deployed, they come with declarative code-configured hardware resources to ensure they run optimally. Other IaC benefits include:

• Consistent infrastructure configuration across different environments
• Easy application/hardware replication and scalability
• Reduced errors as compared to manual hardware configuration
• Quick set up

A popular tool that can be used to provide IaC in IoT is Microtica.

Automation

Managing IoT without automation is an arduous task. Remember, automation is one of the key principles behind DevOps, so automated over-the-air updates, live device monitoring, and remote command execution for troubleshooting and maintenance are critical in ensuring IoT devices run the latest updates error-free and remain reliable at low cost.

Best Practices for IoT DevOps Implementation

• Encourage the adoption of a DevOps culture to foster cooperation between the development and operations teams. The goal is to align them to focus on shared objectives, share knowledge, and cross train.
• Push for the adoption of agile methodologies, which will ensure DevOps teams respond quickly to new customer requirements from the quick feedback loops.
• Implement CI/CD pipelines and a single source of truth to boost automation in integration, testing, and deployment, as well as simplify audits and collaboration.
• Break tasks into smaller chunks (microservices) and deploy them using containers to enable flexibility, modularity, scalability, and easier software maintenance across the distributed devices.
• Implement device monitoring, data analytics, and AI to help in identifying trends, predict issues, and optimize DevOps operations for optimal IoT software and firmware development and deployment.
• Incorporate security into the CI and CD pipelines (DevSecOps) and continuously monitor each microservice for potential vulnerabilities.

Conclusion

Whether your clients manage transportation, healthcare, manufacturing, or energy services, the smartness of IoT systems is critical, and the best way to implement and update this distributed technology is by using DevOps. Pushing updates, automation, scaling, and other software/firmware development and optimization tasks become more streamlined when DevOps practices and pipelines are introduced to run the show.