Distribute and Manage your SW using the IoT paradigm

How to simplify SW deployment in distributed environments

Software distribution is getting more challenging as software grows in complexity and security requirements become stricter every year. Especially in an industrial setting in which SW components are deployed and managed in many isolated, geo-distributed physical sites, it is complex to automate and secure SW distribution. There are many solutions out there, each designed for a specific scenario with specific assumptions. Our challenge is to identify the right tools and the right approach for the task. This article suggests adopting the IIoT (Industrial IoT) paradigm for solving the problem of complex software distribution in an industrial setting. I will demonstrate that there are many commonalities between the management of modern micro-services solutions that are running inside an isolated environment and typical IIoT scenarios. Therefore, in many situations, it will be beneficial to adopt the IIoT design approach and use IoT frameworks for distributing SW. The approach presented below is not a silver bullet. For some complex use cases such as large Kubernetes clusters deployed on on-premises data centers, the IoT paradigm might not fit, yet for many simpler situations adopting IoT design patterns will be a quick win.

By considering every managed on-premises SW component as a “device” or a “module” within a “device”, we can leverage IoT frameworks to fully manage these components from a central location. Not all IoT frameworks available today support containerized software, but many do as the “Intelligent Edge” becomes increasingly popular. As an example, I will use the Azure IoT Edge framework to demonstrate the different capabilities that are required to centralize Software deployment and configuration management.

Maybe the most basic capability of any IoT solution is to be able to communicate with devices both upstream (device to cloud) for sending telemetries from the device to the cloud, and downstream (cloud to device) for sending commands from the cloud to the device. There are several communication protocols that IoT solutions use to achieve this, and the choice is typically made based on the computation power of the device, and the level of connectivity required. LWM2M, MQTT, AMQP, and HTTPS are only a few examples of the communication protocols being used by IoT frameworks. The details and properties of each protocol and how it achieves bidirectional secure communication are beyond the scope of this paper, but the immediate result is that if we choose to use an IoT solution as a framework for our SW management we can assume secure bidirectional communication across firewalls and isolated networks.

Malicious software injection is one of the most popular attack vectors against industrial software. There are many types of mitigations against such attacks. At the core there are a few principles to follow:

IIoT software distribution faces similar challenges with typical software distribution in an industrial setting. Both have many components running in geo-distributed isolated networks, both must comply with the highest security standards and be managed and monitored from a central location. Some will claim that the industrial setting is a private case of IIoT, thus it makes sense to use IIoT frameworks and infrastructures to manage software in an industrial setting.

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