How IoT Affects Firmware and DevOps

the internet of things (iot) continues to be a major topic of discussion in the tech industry. many people want to know: how is the iot influencing me already? that’s one of the themes of this week’s conversation between electric cloud cto anders wallgren and software engineering daily host jeff meyerson.

iot continues to grow, with the proliferation of smart homes, wearables, smart cars, mhealth devices and more. for example, new cars today come pre-wired with hundreds of millions of lines of code already, and much of the embedded software is already connected to the internet. this always-on connectivity offers manufacturers the ability to automatically update software and firmware on iot devices and can greatly increase the rate of new feature updates, and the usability and usefulness to end users.

developing software for the internet of things comes with its own set of challenges.  security, privacy, testing complexities and unified standards are a few key issues. in his interview, anders predicts that in the future, manufacturers will push out software updates without any opt-in or involvement required from the consumer (as he puts it, “the majority of consumers aren’t aware that firmware needs to be regularly updated.”) this places entirely new obligations on software development teams.

developing software for the iot requires completely new competencies for many enterprises. iot spans nearly every aspect of software development, from the back-end to mobile to web to embedded. when managing software lifecycles, it’s important to manage all of these areas. for companies who haven’t historically had much experience developing software, getting into the iot requires a big transition in order to meet customer expectations, and implementing devops practices can help facilitate this evolution.

listen to the full conversation »

read the original blog here .