Introducing the Latest Wind River Studio Developer

It has been exciting to watch the adoption of Wind River Studio Developer since its last release earlier this year!  We have had some great momentum with recent customer announcements, including Wipro, Tata Elxsi, Codelab, and Sii Poland. As those customers start to scale usage, we’re staying in close contact to ensure the product supports their growth.

Our latest release of Studio Developer maintains our north star of reducing the time and cost required to develop secure, compliant, and innovative embedded systems, and tackles scaling challenges such as connectivity, developer experience, performance and cost management. Studio Developer  not only delivers on its core functionality but also scales efficiently to meet the demands of our users.

Improved Connectivity

Connectivity to testing targets is a significant challenge for embedded software teams and is one of the core challenges that Wind River Studio Developer was built to address, specifically via Studio Virtual Lab. We’ve long supported simulated virtual targets for earlier, more scalable testing, and our Studio Lab Connect (SLC) offering provides access to physical testing hardware through a low-cost hardware bridge device such as a Raspberry Pi.

This release of Studio Developer adds a containerized version of SLC, enabling users to more easily manage access to physical testing devices – especially complex test benches and multi-device testing harnesses. The containerized SLC can be easily provisioned and reconfigured dynamically via common cloud native tooling such as orchestration and infrastructure as code (IaC).

Performance and Cost Management

Development infrastructure is highly dynamic, and development leaders often need to balance the competing demands of performance and cost, and to explain where resources are being invested.

The latest release enables pipeline administrators to more easily customize the resource configurations of the containers used for pipeline steps. Organizations can spend more money to speed up resource-intensive steps by assigning a larger compute instance or more RAM, and they can reduce costs by limiting resources for steps that don’t need to run quickly.

The latest release also allows Studio Developer components to be assigned tags, to better understand how components use resources and to better manage costs. These tags work seamlessly with third-party tools like Kubecost which many organizations are already using for cost reporting and management.

Self-Service Developer Experience

One of the major benefits of platforms like Studio Developer comes from enabling self-service access for developers to development infrastructure. A dynamic, cloud-native platform can be scaled more easily without requiring IT tickets and requisition processes. Developers can spin up resources easily when needed, improving productivity and innovation.

Studio Developer extends that concept to the permissions that control access to projects and project resources. Team leads can now independently manage permissions for their projects and resources, avoiding change request queues that require attention from platform administrators.

Studio Pipelines supports robust pipeline logic, and the platform has built-in logic to preserve artifacts, command output, and diagnostic data.  Sometimes developers find themselves implementing the same logic at multiple levels. To reduce such instances, and to give developers better control over the way that artifacts and output are preserved, Studio Developer adds support for a “finally” block that executes after preceding pipeline steps (regardless of whether they pass or fail.)  This should make it easier to define robust logic for saving resources, cleaning up, and sending notifications.

We’ve also increased the verbosity of logging in Studio Over-The-Air Updates so users can more easily diagnose and troubleshoot update campaigns.

As our customer base expands around the world, we want to provide a localized experience for developers to maximize productivity. The latest release includes UI localizations for simplified Chinese to support our growing user base.

Broadened Platform Support

Studio Developer doesn’t exist in a vacuum, of course. Organizations leverage a diverse range of operating environments and tools to build their products, and we continue to update Studio Developer to work with the technologies our customers need.

For customers that leverage a third-party RTOS or ecosystem, we’ve verified that Studio Developer works well outside the Wind River ecosystem. For example, we have users that build QNX and Android codebases in Studio Pipelines. The beauty of the Pipelines architecture is that it can work with anything that can be containerized – including both Linux- and Windows-based containers.

For customers that leverage Wind River edge technologies, we make it even easier with pre-built containers and environments for VxWorks®, Wind River® Helix™ Virtualization Platform, and Wind River® Linux.

Getting Wind River Studio Developer

Wind River Studio Developer can benefit any organization that develops software, especially those developing for embedded systems or the intelligent edge. If you’d like to learn more about how Studio Developer can help your team, we’d love to chat.

If you’re already a Studio Developer user, the  installer for the latest release is available in the Gallery Product Portal. The upgrade path has been streamlined for those moving from the previous version  to the latest  to ensure a smooth transition, and our team is always happy to help.

About the author

Jon Jarboe is a Senior Product Marketing Manager at Wind River