system architecture

Extracting Microservices from a Modular Monolith

by Burkhard Stubert
2025/04/082025/04/20

When developing the operator terminals for their machines, OEMs must reinvent the wheel over and again. Each OEM implements home-grown solutions for standard features like OTA updates, user authentication, factory installation, machine gateways and IoT gateways. None of these features belong to the OEM’s core business. OEMs could save a lot of time and money, if they could buy these features as ready-made solutions from third-party vendors.

The commands for updating u-boot using an A/B strategy

Updating U-Boot with an A/B Strategy

by Burkhard Stubert
2024/05/132024/05/13
5 Comments

Unlike consumer devices, machines, ECUs or medical devices are in the field for 15 or more years. There inevitably comes the time in their life, when you must update their boot loader. I’ll show you how to do this from an embedded Linux system running on an NXP iMX8M Plus. You can adapt the method to other SoCs and use it for OTA updates, as well.

Ports-and-Adapters Architecture: The Pattern

by Burkhard Stubert
2023/08/242023/12/03
1 Comment

The ports-and-adapters architecture should be the standard architecture for HMI applications. Its parts are loosely coupled, cohesive, easy to test and easy to extend. We can apply the reverse Conway manoeuvre to create self-dependent teams with minimal dependencies on other teams. I’ll motivate the ports-and-adapters or hexagonal architecture with USB ports and adapters and look at the architecture pattern from the production, testing and team perspective. I’ll apply the architecture to the HMI terminal of a harvester.

The Key Principles of Continuous Delivery

by Burkhard Stubert
2022/11/282022/11/28
2 Comments

In the seminal book Accelerate, Forsgren and her co-authors provide empirical evidence that Continuous Delivery has a positive impact on the performance of software development organisations. If organisations neglect some of the principles and practices of Continuous Delivery, their performance will suffer. They will reach the point where simple changes will take ages to implement. Not so with Continuous Delivery.

Parking at Munich Airport: An Awful Experience

by Burkhard Stubert
2022/10/24

The parking experience at Munich Airport is awful. It is too easy to do something wrong, which can only be remedied by calling support. The bad user experience is caused by a bad system architecture. The pieces for a better architecture are already in place. Improving the interaction between these pieces improves the architecture and a fortiori the user experience. I can at least dream of a better parking experience in the future, although I can’t change the current one.

Visualising the Architecture of Qt Embedded Systems: Context and Container Diagrams

by Burkhard Stubert
2022/07/112022/07/11
2 Comments

I never got the hang of UML: overly complicated, hard to understand, too close to code. Hence, I was skeptical about C4 diagrams when I… Read More »Visualising the Architecture of Qt Embedded Systems: Context and Container Diagrams