Michael Howard’s research while affiliated with Portland State University and other places

The ESP32 is a popular microcontroller from Espressif that can be used in many embedded applications. Robotic joints, smart car chargers, beer vat agitators and automated bread mixers are a few examples where this system-on-a-chip excels. It is cheap to buy and has a number of vendors providing low-cost development board kits that come with the microcontroller and many external connection points with peripherals. There is a large software ecosystem for the ESP32. Espressif maintains an SDK containing many C-language sample projects providing a starting point for a huge variety of software services and I/O needs. Third party projects provide additional sample code as well as support for other programming languages. For example, MicroPython is a mature project with sample code and officially supported by Espressif. The SDK provides tools to not just build an application but also merge a flash image, flash to the microcontroller and monitor the output. Is it possible to build the ESP32 load and emulate on another host OS? This paper qualitatively explores the QEMU emulator and its ability to emulate the ethernet interface for the guest OS. Additionally, we look into the concept of containerizing the entire emulator and ESP32 load package such that a microcontroller flash image can successfully run with a one-step deployment of a Docker container.

The ESP32 is a popular microcontroller from Espressif that can be used in many embedded applications. Robotic joints, smart car chargers, beer vat agitators and automated bread mixers are a few examples where this system-on-a-chip excels. It is cheap to buy and has a number of vendors providing low-cost development board kits that come with the microcontroller and many external connection points with peripherals. There is a large software ecosystem for the ESP32. Espressif maintains an SDK containing many C-language sample projects providing a starting point for a huge variety of software services and I/O needs. Third party projects provide additional sample code as well as support for other programming languages. For example, MicroPython is a mature project with sample code and officially supported by Espressif. The SDK provides tools to not just build an application but also merge a flash image, flash to the microcontroller and monitor the output. Is it possible to build the ESP32 load and emulate on another host OS? This paper explores the QEMU emulator and its ability to emulate the ethernet interface for the guest OS. Additionally, we look into the concept of containerizing the entire emulator and ESP32 load package such that a microcontroller flash image can successfully run with a one-step deployment of a Docker container.

Compute infrastructure hosted by a cloud provider allows an application to scale without limit. The application developer no longer needs to worry about the up-front investment in a server farm provisioned for a worst-case load scenario. However, managing cloud deployments requires a sophisticated framework that can autoscale the infrastructure and guarantee the up-time of running container images. This paper surveys existing research addressing the management and orchestration of cloud deployments as well as the modelling framework to abstract away the low-level details of the host infrastructure. We investigate blockchain distributed ledgers, quantum computing and Internet of Things application stacks to show how they can utilize cloud deployments.

Deploying an application into a Kubernetes cluster requires sending a manifest file to the cluster's control plane interface. This action is typically performed through a kubectl client which is configured and authorized to communicate with the control plane's Uniform Resource Locator (URL). An application typically requires many Kubernetes resources such as pods, deployments, secrets, service and volumes. Configuring each of these through manifest files requires complex scripting, especially when there are numerous resources needed. A solution to the complex management tasks is Helm. Helm provides both a tool and underlying framework that packages the necessary manifest files. These packages are deployed through a single step install command which abstracts all the underlying control plane interaction from the user. Similar to application installs through Debian's package manager dpkg, packages are shared through local and remote repositories and allow the user to easily install, update, delete or handle concurrent versions.

Developing a software service requires a strict software development life cycle and process. This process demands controlling all application code through source control management as well as a rigorous versioning and branching strategy. However, the platform and infrastructure also benefit from this rigor. Software services must be deployed to a target run time environment and provisioning that environment through manual user actions is tedious and error-prone. Provisioning manually also becomes prohibitive as the number of resources grow and spread globally over multiple regions. The answer is to apply the same rigor to provisioning the infrastructure as applied to developing the application software. Terraform provides a platform allowing infrastructure resources to be defined in code. This code not only allows the automation of the infrastructure provisioning but also allows for a strict development and review life cycle, same as the application software.