Making of DevOps Lifecycle for a Yocto Project

In the end of this post, I will answer a question which many of us ignore or don’t ask us as a DevOps engineer and also we will get a detail explanation of what is the reason behind that answer.

It seems kind of that common blog that tell you how to setup CI/CD , IAAC and orchestration for a project of your team, but there is something more to it which makes it little bit different which you get on various channels out there to setup DevOps cycle for a project.

Mostly all DevOps enthusiast have started their journey by learning how to setup CI/CD for a web application and then using cloud services etc. for the same. Then when we get into a company where we get the chance to work on a web application only, then we showcase our skills to improve that project and in the process we learn new technologies which lays the base of our career path.

Now apart from a web app project, when we encounter any other kind of project which are having different kind of build system, different ways of debugging an issue and a completely different code architecture, then things changes little bit for a devops engineer for how to setup a full fledged devops architecture for that project.

As a devops engineers, we need to have full knowledge of all of the below mentioned things atleast to be able to work on that project seamlessly :

1 - Understanding how yocto works and a full understanding of bitbake which will help to debug any build issue there itself.

2 - As yocto project will have lot of environment dependencies, we need to have knowledge of all which will also help us to create a docker image for that project.

3 - Since it will involve native code of Qcom , Unisoc , etc. , we need to have a basic understanding if not full and how that project is using the Qcom code.

4 - How to setup CI/CD for that Yocto project since there will be a direct build of that project and most probably the binary out of that build will be for a hardware device like (IOT device etc. ), so deployment of that binary also becomes very crucial which should not report any issue at the customer level because many times we will not have luxury for a FOTA build for some kinds of hardware devices.

If we master all of the above traits, then we are good to work on a DevOpsproject and then off course any time we are free to enhance this by introducing different cloud services , k8s and whole lot of monitoring kind of stuffs. So, the answer to the question that DevOps activities for all projects similar is a big “NO“ and we have seen it “WHY“ in above writing.