In embedded development today, teams face growing pressure to release products quickly without compromising on quality. But for many organizations, older workflows and disconnected toolchains create bottlenecks that slow progress and increase costs.
The reality: Fragmentation, delays, and lost productivity
Recently, I spoke with a global industrial automation company that perfectly illustrated the challenge. Their development teams were spread across multiple regions, each working with slightly different setups. While one site used custom scripts on a Windows build machine, another had engineers manually setting up Linux environments—installing toolchains and dependencies without containers or automation. The result? Frequent build failures, mismatched configurations, and long onboarding times for new developers.
Troubleshooting build and pipeline failures consumed nearly 40% of their development time, time that could have gone toward innovation or improving quality.
And it gets worse.
Each team had its own approach to building, testing, and integrating code, making it nearly impossible to maintain consistent quality or scale efficiently across the organization.
The turning point: Standardized embedded CI/CD workflows
To solve these challenges, the company turned to IAR’s toolchain for CI/CD, part of IAR’s cloud-enabled platform.
By containerizing the build environment and integrating with their existing CI systems, they:
- Achieved 50% faster builds on Linux, reducing infrastructure costs and improving energy efficiency.
- Cut debugging time by 80%, freeing developers to focus on new features and long-term improvements.
- Delivered reproducible, scalable builds across their projects using various MCUs, eliminating cross-team compatibility issues.
And all of this was accomplished without sacrificing the reliability and deep hardware support they had come to expect from IAR’s toolchain.
Why modernizing embedded CI/CD matters
This story is far from unique.
Many embedded software teams are waking up to the fact that traditional, manual workflows are no longer sustainable. As systems grow more complex and globally distributed, the need for automated, standardized, and scalable DevOps pipelines becomes mission-critical.
Industry experts like Jacob Beningo emphasize this in frameworks such as his 7-Step Guide to Modernizing Embedded Development, where automation, reproducibility, and cloud-ready tools take center stage. These aren’t just nice-to-haves, they’re essential for staying competitive.
The IAR platform: Your path to consistent, scalable DevOps
At IAR, we’ve built our embedded platform with exactly these challenges in mind. Whether you're working on safety-critical automotive systems or fast-paced industrial applications, our tools are designed to help you scale with confidence.
With our cloud-enabled CI/CD solutions, teams can:
- Automate embedded builds through seamless integration with GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, and Azure DevOps.
- Leverage containerized toolchains via Docker, ensuring consistent environments across all teams and geographies.
- Detect defects early with integrated static and runtime analysis tools like IAR C-STAT and C-RUN, reducing costly late-stage bugs.
The outcome: Faster time-to-market, lower risk, greater focus
By adopting a modern, cloud-enabled CI/CD workflow, embedded teams can eliminate delays, reduce variability, and dramatically increase the speed and quality of their software development.
The results speak for themselves:
- Shorter time-to-market
- Improved product quality
- Happier, more productive engineering teams
Ready to modernize?
If you're struggling with inconsistent workflows, manual builds, or unreliable toolchains, you're not alone, and you don’t have to settle. The IAR platform helps embedded teams move beyond the limitations of the past and embrace a modern, DevOps-driven future.
Join our upcoming webinar on April 15th, Breaking the CI/CD bottleneck: Scaling embedded DevSecOps with containers & automation (register to Americas session or Europe/Asia session), to learn how to streamline your CI/CD pipeline, boost performance, and simplify compliance with cloud-ready, containerized workflows.
Working in a smaller team? You might find the webinar on April 16th Surviving without a DevOps team: CI/CD, debugging, and containers for embedded teams (register to Americas session or Europe/Asia session), a better fit for your needs.
