Key Benefits to FoundriesFactory

Accelerate Time to Market

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The FoundriesFactory cloud service uses cloud development technologies to streamline team-based software development. We enable software teams to focus on their own value add and application, based on a maintained secure open source device management platform. Faster time to market is achieved by reducing developer friction, building in Continuous Integration and test infrastructure, leveraging an existing unified and tested software platform, and separating the product application from core functions.

Key FoundriesFactory features that accelerate time to market include:

  • Developer team support with whitelisted team members and roles
  • Wide choice of supported industry SoCs and manufacturer development boards as the starting point for your project
  • Yocto-based builds in the cloud with caching for accelerated builds
  • Security and OSTree-based incremental OTA updates built in as standard
  • Product-ready builds designed as your reference for secure end products
  • Docker Container runtime built in as standard (can be removed) provides separation of application and services development from platform hardware enablement and customization
  • Continuous Integration on each Git commit, and testing via OTA updates to local or remote devices
  • Customization by overlays and custom layers, and not forking the core platform - speeds development time and reduces technical debt
  • Tagged releases enable simultaneous work on multiple builds (e.g. development, testing, pilot, release, experimental) by development and production team members

Reduce Costs

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FoundriesFactory is a complete cloud service for developing, deploying and maintaining your IoT and Edge devices and fleets, for lifetime customer success. Our model is a simple fixed subscription per project with no per unit royalties, and no per transaction fees or other hidden costs. At a fraction of the cost of a single junior engineer you gain the benefit of our entire team’s decades of knowledge and experience in building, testing and deploying embedded and connected devices. You may stop your subscription at any time - you will own all your existing project source code (open source from Foundries.io and your own modifications) and can then continue development and/or maintenance in house thereafter.

How Does FoundriesFactory reduce costs?

  • Faster time to market and use of a product ready platform reduces development cost
  • A maintained platform from boot firmware to cloud reduces your technical debt and allows your engineers to focus on value add, and not non-differentiating but complex platform software
  • A common platform across multiple projects and different hardware designs reduces expensive duplication by multiple teams
  • SoC dependent manufacturing tools for secure deployment, together with remote device and fleet management services, are all included
  • Lifetime product maintenance of the core platform, and infrastructure to enable you to keep your software and customers updated is included in the subscription. This removes the need for traditional maintenance beyond LTS in-house or via costly third party service providers
  • A single vendor for all aspects of device & fleet software reduces the costs of ensuring end to end product quality and security
  • No per unit fees means we do not penalize you for your product success

Full Customization

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FoundriesFactory is designed to be customized to your own application and use case. You can modify any part of the platform, integrate your own IP, applications and services, while still benefiting from support and updates to the underlying open source projects including the Linux microPlatform. You own your own changes and IP in your own Factory and have complete control.

Customizing your Factory:

  • Maintain your own source code as overlays and private layers using the templated Yocto platform. Work locally or remotely and configure automated CI builds as you commit changes
  • Customize any part of the stack - bootloader, device tree, kernel, and user space. For example, easily substitute/work with a specific kernel version to your project requirement
  • Add your applications and services in user space or using Container technologies. We support Docker by default with Docker Compose Apps, enabling easy separation of applications from the core platform
  • Interface to the public or private cloud(s) of your choice
  • Use the Factory device and fleet management APIs and CLI tools with your own UI, or work with the third party provider of your choice
  • Maintain multiple builds using tags for development and production versions
  • Foundries.io welcomes contributions to the Linux microPlatform and other projects we maintain on Github. If we accept your contributions (and/or you upstream them to the relevant open source projects), then they will be supported moving forwards

Secure Platform

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FoundriesFactory is secure by design - from device boot software to the Cloud. Foundries.io software provides industry leading security features for your products from a single vendor. Our holistic approach runs from secure boot architecture, including Arm Platform Security Architecture (PSA) and Intel Platform Trust Technology (PTT) through the entire software stack to The Update Framework (TUF)-compliant secure product updates.

Our security stack includes:

  • Secure boot - ensures that the device is booting the correct and trusted software
  • OP-TEE - Trusted Execution Environment for Arm TrustZone-based SoCs
  • Remote Attestation - allows logging and auditing of the running secure software
  • Key installation - installation of keys at manufacturing and/or deployment using SoC manufacturer tools
  • Minimal, mostly read-only root file system with full encryption option
  • SE-Linux option for enhanced access control
  • TUF-compliant incremental secure OTA updates using OSTree and Aktualizr-lite for firmware, blobs, kernel, user space and containers. All updates are encrypted and secured with per-device and/or per-fleet public keys. 
  • TUF-compliant key revocation and rotation options
  • Authentication and secure access to public clouds including Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services
  • Configurable secure access to remote devices using Linux WireGuard secure VPN tunnel
  • Optional use of third party Hardware Security Element (HSE) features including key generation, secure key, credential and data storage, cryptographic accelerators from vendors such as Rambus, NXP and others.

Market Leading Knowledge

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The Foundries executive team members come from executive roles in global hardware and open source software companies including Arm, Linaro and Intermec/Honeywell. The company’s founding engineering team have decades of experience in embedded and connected product development and deployment. The team includes life long open source maintainers who were tired of working with fragmented embedded software. Together they set out to build an open platform that implements best industry standards throughout and is built for scalability and longevity.

Why Foundries.io?

  • Industry leadership in delivering an open software platform that reinvents IoT
  • Strong executive team with extensive startup and large company experience across global locations
  • Experienced open source engineering team who are contributors to key industry projects including the Linux kernel, the Yocto Project, OP-TEE, the Zephyr Project, Aktualizr, U-Boot and many others
  • Extensive device driver and hardware enablement expertise across many Arm projects, x86 and RISC-V
  • Platform experience in RTOS, Android, Yocto, Ubuntu, CentOS and other Linux distributions
  • Expertise in CI and test systems for device bringup, functional and deployment testing including LTP, LAVA, Jenkins, KernelCI and jobserv
  • Industry security expertise from individual MCU/SoC implementations, to software and hardware based security frameworks from silicon to cloud. Open source security expertise in boot software, OP-TEE trusted execution environments, secure Linux and APIs such as TLS, HTTPS, OpenSSL and PKCS11. Platform software for Hardware Security Elements elements including TPMs, Rambus CMRT and NXP SE050
  • Experience in Devops and Cloud back-end deployment including Docker, other Container and virtualization technologies, Kubernetes, AWS and scale out web services and deployments

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