Open Source Summit + Embedded Linux Conference North America 2026

Embedded software complexity has doubled every four years for decades. The way most teams build and deploy it is still stuck in the 2010s. Version control exists, but it's still not unusual for code to be shipped from a sharpie-labeled SD card or prod code to live on one machine. Deployment still means walking over to a test bench and hoping nobody else is using it. "It works on my machine" is often an entire strategy.

This talk brings modern DevOps to embedded systems. We'll cover version control workflows that actually work for firmware, build environments that don't depend on that one engineer's laptop, CI/CD pipelines that integrate with real hardware, and deployment strategies that reduce the risk of bricking devices in the field. We'll also touch on what to steal from web DevOps and what doesn't translate when your deployment target isn't a cloud server.

We'll demo the whole flow: commit, build, deploy to hardware. You'll leave with practical patterns you can bring back to your own embedded projects. Some embedded experience is useful, but if you've ever been frustrated by how your team ships firmware, you'll get something out of this.