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Platforms and operations

This quadrant covers real-time operating systems, embedded build distributions, container runtimes, cloud infrastructure platforms, and messaging protocols.

Ring: Adopt

FreeRTOS

  • Status: Adopt
  • Tags: rtos, embedded, real-time, microcontroller
  • Rationale: The core real-time operating system kernel powering our microcontroller firmware. FreeRTOS provides deterministic preemptive task scheduling, minimal RAM overhead (\(< 10\,\mathrm{KB}\)), and extensive hardware support across ARM Cortex-M and RISC-V architectures.

Yocto Project

  • Status: Adopt
  • Tags: linux, embedded, build-system, gateways
  • Rationale: Standard build automation framework for producing customized, minimal, and fully reproducible embedded Linux board support packages (BSPs) for edge compute gateways.

Docker

  • Status: Adopt
  • Tags: containers, devops, cloud, ci
  • Rationale: Standard containerization runtime for cloud microservices, local developer environments, and automated CI build runners. Guarantees environment parity between development and production.

Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

  • Status: Adopt
  • Tags: cloud, infrastructure, analytics, bigquery
  • Rationale: Primary cloud platform provider hosting our IoT telemetry ingestion pipelines, BigQuery data analytics warehouse, and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) clusters.

MQTT

  • Status: Adopt
  • Tags: iot, protocol, pubsub, messaging
  • Rationale: Standard lightweight publish/subscribe protocol for low-bandwidth, high-latency edge-to-cloud device communications. Provides QoS delivery guarantees and keep-alive heartbeats over TLS.

Serverless (Cloud Functions / Cloud Run)

  • Status: Adopt
  • Tags: cloud, serverless, faas, event-driven
  • Rationale: Adopted for asynchronous event processing, third-party webhook receivers, and sporadic background tasks that scale instantly from zero to thousands of instances without dedicated server costs.

Ring: Assess

CloudEvents

  • Status: Assess
  • Tags: standards, event-driven, cloud, cncf
  • Rationale: Assessing the CNCF CloudEvents 1.0 specification for standardising event envelopes and metadata across heterogeneous cloud and edge message buses.