VM, Containers, and Serverless Programming for Embedded Developers (.PDF Download)

Having already provided developers with virtual machines (VM) and containers, enterprise computing  has now rolled out serverless programming. This migration takes advantage of the growth in cores and processors within the cloud and enterprise systems. The number of cores involved is staggering compared to a typical embedded system that employs a virtual memory operating system like Linux. I mention this to partition out lower-end embedded systems that may lack even a memory management unit.

Enterprise computing tends to be way ahead of embedded development technology for a variety of reasons, including the need to push the envelope in terms of size, performance, management, and capacity. Embedded systems rarely push the same limits, and designs tend to be more conservative since they often need to run for years or decades. Still, many of the technologies that have been refined at the enterprise level are finding their way into embedded systems development depending upon how applicable and how robust the solutions are. VMs are one example where the technology has been commonplace in the enterprise and is becoming more common in embedded systems.