Meetup #23: DevOps for Embedded Developers [1/possibly INF]

Ladies and Gentlemen, please receive our first (out of who knows many?) DevOps meetup!
Another possible title: Embedded Everywhere is back!

As this one is going to be online very international, you are welcome to join us , no matter where you are on the planet (or if you have good internet connection outside of it) and join our DevOps Meetup, either as a participant, or as a panelist!

We are going to meet for a very important topic, and for that we invited very appreciated experts. I would like to thank my dear friends from SoftwareMill for teaming up with us on this one.

Administration first:
1. You will receive a calendar invite with the link to join a couple of days before the meetup.
2. For this you must register here

Addendum: We will publish the link *this time* in the meetup. Only if you register to it though.

AGENDA
ARM64 build servers as your Embedded Linux development flow X-Factor (Ron Munitz @ The PSCG/PSCG Holdings LTD)
We will discuss the methods and pain-points associated with building modern (read: irrationally heavy!) arm64 Embedded Linux systems, covering (cross) toolchains, emulators, containers, CI/CD workflows and more. We will cover a couple of very real stories of 10-hour build times (AOSP, and a very simple Tauri app) that give motivation for when you must do something different, even if your organization is not (yet) set up to it, even if the organization is part of Amazon. Yes that Amazon (maybe struggling to override some IT resource allocation policies is why we were not invited to Venice for that modest, low budget wedding? O_o)

We will talk about the good, the bad, the terrible, and the very ugly, giving some major pitfalls, workarounds and solutions, and reasoning that embedded folks should make devices work, and hire DevOps to do DevOps for them, to avoid catching up with everything for a week every couple of years ;-)

DevOps for Embedded Development ( Mariusz Walczyk @ SoftwareMill )
- Why DevOps? → Faster builds, automation, fast feedback loops; embedded adds hardware complexity
- Build Challenges → Cross-compilation, static linking, native vs. virtualized builds; Buildroot, Yocto
- QEMU → Emulate hardware for early dev/testing; limited peripherals
- Docker → Reproducible containerized builds; base images, portability
- GitHub Actions → `buildx`, QEMU runners, integrated CI/CD with git
- Runners → Public vs. self-hosted (ARM boards, cloud VMs); cost vs. flexibility
- Scaling → Labels (`arm64`, `lcd-test`), matrix builds for speed
- Optimization → Caching, dependency cleanup, secure pipelines
- CI/CD Tools → GitHub Actions, Jenkins, GCP, AWS, Azure; runner architecture support
- Testing → Unit, integration, HIL; LCD validation via image/GPIO
- IaC → Terraform, Pulumi; versioned infra, reproducible environments
- Summary → DevOps adds value in embedded; combine automation, testing, runners

Q&A and a Panel Discussion
In this session, experts from The PSCG, SoftwareMill (and maybe your company if you reach out to us before July 8th!) will tackle some questions that have been brought up, and will be brought up during the meetup. You are welcome to send some questions in this event page, and we will do our best to address them on the panel!