Wednesday
Room 4
11:40 - 12:40
(UTC+02)
Talk (60 min)
OTA Updates in the Wild: Lessons from the Field
In an always-connected world, the ability to push updates to embedded devices in the field isn't just a nice-to-have — it's critical. But implementing secure, reliable, and maintainable over-the-air (OTA) update systems is still one of the trickiest parts of embedded development.
In this talk, we’ll go beyond theory and dive into what it really takes to deliver OTA at scale. You’ll get a breakdown of architectural patterns, tooling options, and the real-world tradeoffs you’ll face when deploying firmware updates to constrained devices — often with unreliable connectivity, limited storage, and mission-critical uptime requirements.
Jana Perić
Jana is an Embedded Linux Engineer at Northern.tech, where she helps customers succeed (and occasionally survive) with Mender — the open-source OTA update manager. With hands-on experience shipping firmware updates into the wild, Jana has seen everything from flawless rollouts to devices that went mysteriously silent mid-update. She specializes in turning complex OTA setups into something humans can actually maintain, and she secretly enjoys debugging broken bootloaders more than she probably should. When not neck-deep in Yocto layers or U-Boot environment puzzles, she’s usually trying to explain to her friends what “firmware” actually means.