Hardening EMF with Continuous Delivery: Our Multi‑Stage Pipeline

[hwindlas]

As the Edge Manageability Framework (EMF) continues to evolve—supporting new hardware variants, OS profiles, secure deployment modes, and orchestrator capabilities—the need for consistent, automated validation grows rapidly. Ensuring that each code change behaves reliably across this expanding surface area requires a structured Continuous Delivery (CD) system rather than ad‑hoc testing.
To address this, we built a unified, multi‑stage CD pipeline that validates EMF continuously from pull request to full hardware-backed system verification. This pipeline provides fast feedback, enforces quality gates, and hardens EMF across diverse edge configurations.

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The Unified Continuous Delivery Framework

The CD pipeline validates EMF across heterogeneous combinations of:

• CPU classes
• OS profiles
• secure and non-secure modes
• cloud and on‑prem deployments
• hardware configurations with accelerators

This infrastructure now forms the backbone of EMF’s reliability.

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Pipeline Stages

1️⃣ Development Stage (GitHub Actions — VIP)

• Runs on every PR
• Deploys orchestrator on a virtual Edge Node
• Executes Core Foundation E2E tests
• Handles environment setup, configuration validation, and teardown
• Provides fast, deterministic checks before hardware validation

VIP is the only stage not orchestrated via Jenkins.

2️⃣ Integration Gate (Jenkins — HIP)

• Captures a Build Known Good Configuration (BKC)
• Triggers system E2E tests across cloud + on‑prem environments
• Uses real hardware to validate EMF’s core behavior
• Successful BKCs are tagged as pass-integration

3️⃣ Validation & Staging Gates (Jenkins)

• Generates daily/weekly tags from pass-integration
• Deploys tags across internal and external cloud environments
• Executes a structured test matrix spanning:
  • hardware variants (multiple CPU families)
  • OS profiles (Ubuntu, Edge Microvisor Toolkit)
  • deployment modes (SB, FDE, non‑SB)
  • cluster/deployment templates
• Runs extended Golden Suite covering:
  • functional scenarios
  • resilience
  • performance
  • security

4️⃣ KPI Tracking & Reporting (Jenkins)

Collected per-build and weekly:

• orchestrator & agent health
• onboarding/provisioning consistency
• test pass distribution
• behavioral drift across hardware profiles
• reliability of lifecycle operations
• time‑to‑green and stage-level stability

These KPIs help identify regressions early and maintain quality across configurations.

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Value Proposition

• Complexity Reduction: Unified pipeline validates changes across 24+ component integrations and multiple orchestrator/edge deployment profiles.
• Automation Efficiency: A single self-triggered pipeline with a reusable test matrix covering HW, OS, deployment modes, and templates.
• Quality & Traceability: Every gate emits audit trails, tags, logs, and KPIs for consistent, reproducible validation.

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Results & Impact

• The CD framework has substantially streamlined the release process by automating validation across hardware, OS profiles, and cloud/on‑prem environments.
• Early stages now detect issues well before broader validation, reducing engineering effort and rework.
• Coverage and depth have increased: Core Foundation validates every combination, while extended suites thoroughly exercise features, performance, resilience, and security.
• The unified approach has improved consistency across orchestrator configurations and edge node variants.
• The pipeline now supports a predictable weekly release cadence, producing consistently validated builds that are consumable by the open-source community.
• This cadence improves transparency, accelerates iteration, and provides contributors with stable, dependable artifacts each week.

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Conclusion
This unified CD framework provides EMF with a scalable foundation for continuous quality.
By enforcing structured gates, broadening test coverage, and enabling predictable weekly releases, the pipeline ensures consistent behavior and reliability across the diverse edge ecosystem EMF supports.