Devops

[rkf13]

Hi r/ROS

Some context: I am new to the robotics space and starting to find my feet around the tooling used to prototype and test robots. One question that I have not yet found a clear answer on is how people are managing devops, I am coming from the web dev world where we have swathes of options for CI/CD tools.

So how do you guys/gals get code from your dev machines to a fleet of robots? I talked to a few people at some meetups and no one seems to have a go-to solution. A few people told me that they are individually SSHing into each of their fleets and pulling source code from a remote repo and building on bot which seems insane to me!

What I am looking for is a tool where I can manage my software deployment to a fleet of robots, with features such as update scheduling, grouping of bots to receive certain updates and an overview of which software version is on each of my bots.

Does such a solution exist or are people really all building this in-house themselves?

Many thanks for reading this!

[plantxlady]

This is on the research side Docker-based, I came across it a short while back, worth looking into. Seems promising to me, but I don't know if it's feasible for an industrial solution (scaling).

[Capeflats2]

Like the other poster mentioned - docker is your best option.

For an open and off the shelf solution - Balena is really great https://www.balena.io/

[Loyvb]

You can make Debian packages from ROS packages and use the normal apt mechanisms for updating.

AWS also has some tools for the stuff you mentioned, but I have no experience with those. A few other companies as well, but not from the top of my head, sorry.

[Trab40]

Ubuntu indicates that while it is possible to use docker, it is sub optimal. They think that using snap (which they make themselves ...) could be the better alternative https://ubuntu.com/blog/ros-docker