See you there when I see you!
It’s finally time. I am finally attending my first Linux Foundation event after failing to attend it twice. The first time it was a visa issue to go to Open Source Summit, Edinburgh, and then the next time, it was Covid that restricted me from attending KubeCon 2020.
I submitted a few proposals on the work I have been doing at balena with hardware-in-the-loop pipelines, e2e testing, Leviathan, documentation, open hardware, and developer advocacy. Thankfully CFP gods were happy with one of those proposals, and it was the one below that has been accepted in cdCon + gitOpsCon 2023 happening in Vancouver.
Testing 100’s of OS Images with Jenkins: A Journey from Pull Request to Production Release
BalenaOS is an open-source, Yocto-based Linux operating system supported on over 90 IoT boards. 90 different balenaOS images are being supported, developed, tested, and released by our CI/CD system. These 90 images have versions. Hundreds of versions each. Each pull request builds all 90 balenaOS images for all supported boards to test changes. About 30 of these draft images are tested on actual hardware in a board farm made up of testing kits called Autokit.
When the tests pass, the balenaOS image is ready and released to production. Every part of this intricate and complex process has been built, scaled, and ultimately automated on Jenkins. In this talk, we talk about Jenkins’s use case in our CI/CD toolchain to build an OS, test it, and eventually release it to production. We go over how Jenkins interfaces with our code management tool, GitHub, to pick up the right jobs. We explain how we test using our own hardware workers with tests running on Jenkins and how we have scaled the system to test 30-40 releases of balenaOS in a day.
I am in the acceptance phase right now. It’s finally happening for me. I am writing this while sitting in front of my boarding gate in Helsinki due to land in Seattle 9 hours later. It has been a long journey, and it’s still longer ahead. I am looking forward to using my social batteries again, connecting faces with usernames, and generally having a good time in Vancouver doing something I love.
If you are interested in the talk or are just reading this, please do reach out. I would absolutely love to connect with you and your team. Till then, live in the mix.
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