IoT & Foundries.io FAQs
Business FAQs
Our vision is to be the OS of everyThing. We have built a secure, open source platform for the world's connected devices, and a cloud service to configure this to any hardware and any cloud.
Our customers pay a fixed subscription per project or per company with no per unit fees and unlimited fair usage of our build, test, deployment and update infrastructure. This dramatically reduces engineering and maintenance costs and enables our customers to focus on their own IP and value-creation.
We lead the industry in providing a complete solution for the IoT and Edge product lifecycle. Every customer product leverages the open source Linux microPlatform combined with customer IP, enabling us to build a lasting platform that can be used in billions of globally connected devices.
The Factory accelerates your time to market and dramatically reduces lifetime engineering costs. Your team can focus on your own application and value add IP, and not the complexity of building secure Linux, over the air updates, and device/fleet deployment from the ground up. The Factory brings our extensive domain expertise to your product for less than the cost of a single junior developer.
The Foundries.io Linux microPlatform (LmP) is an OS for IoT and Edge devices, designed using best industry practices for security and OTA updates. FoundriesFactory is a cloud service that enables you to rapidly build, deploy and maintain secure, connected products incorporating your own IP and applications, reducing time to market and engineering costs.
A cloud service to develop, CI/test, deploy and maintain secure, OTA updatable IoT and Edge products. It comprises secure firmware, Linux operating system, device and fleet services, private and public cloud interfaces, and lifetime software maintenance updates.
No. You may stop your subscription at any time. You retain all your source code and can build all of your product software. You will not have access to the FoundriesFactory and will therefore need to make your own arrangements with your own team or other commercial providers for updates, continuous integration, device and fleet management and a secure update backend.
Embedded systems are different from mobile devices and servers. Every product has different needs, different use cases and different hardware configurations which creates software complexity. Others provide piecemeal solutions, creating challenges when delivering security from multiple vendor sources. FoundriesFactory reinvents software development and lifecycle management for IoT and Edge products.
Technical FAQs
We support any hardware that can run the Linux operating system. To get you started we support a range of standard development boards for Arm, Intel and RISC-V SoCs. FoundriesFactory is designed to give you maximum flexibility to configure to your own hardware, add your own IP and meet your customer needs.
FoundriesFactory provides automated Continuous Integration with builds triggered on each source code change. The build system supports multiple developers and branches. Each new build can be OTA delivered to a local or remote device and your tests can be run on any designated device.
OSTree and Aktualizr-lite provide incremental updates for the Linux file system and optional containers, minimizing the OS payload. Updates secured using the TUF specification are power safe and containers can be updated without a product restart. Automatic roll-back takes place if the update fails for any reason.
Production devices use secure boot with root of trust and attestation, PKI with signed certificates and rotatable keys, operating system features, and best industry practices to ensure end product and fleet security. All updates and data communications are carried out using secure encryption protocols, and updates conform to the industry TUF specification.
We use Yocto to fully customize the LmP to your own hardware and use case - adding your IP and applications, or changing out the Linux kernel. Yocto, OSTree and Aktualizr-lite allow our back end to securely manage your product OS and optional containers - which can provide complete OTA-managed software such as an Ubuntu-based ROS stack for robotics, or an Automotive Grade Linux stack.
When your product is ready for production the root of trust can be installed during manufacturing or at first deployment (secure device onboarding). We provide REST APIs and CLI tools for management of IoT device and fleets, enabling easy integration into your own application. Our software integrates seamlessly with public clouds such as AWS, Watson IoT, Azure and Google Cloud.