Continuous Delivery of Customized SaaS Edge Applications in Highly Distributed IoT Systems

Edge computing is a reality for the current IoT systems that need fast processing and quick response time to make real-time decisions and IoT systems without permanent connectivity to the cloud (e.g., car manufacturing, precision agriculture, or cattle raising). Additionally, these industries are facing the need for rapid and continuous innovation by accelerating the delivery of over-the-air (OTA) software updates in edge devices. DevOps promotes collaboration between development and operation teams and automation at all steps of software construction to achieve continuous delivery (CD) of business value. Although DevOps has demonstrated numerous successful cases in the Web domain, in the IoT domain and, more specifically, at the edge, there are few reported cases. This work presents a success case of CD of customized software as a service software as a service (SaaS) updates at the IoT Edge. This may enable new business models at the IoT Edge. This article presents an architectural model of a highly distributed (cloud and edge) IoT system and a CD process flow for customized SaaS applications in edge nodes. Both the architectural model and the CD process flow are instantiated in a case study for precision agriculture.