You are a software developer. It is the start of the project, and due to schedule constraints you are asked to start on your software before the target environment has been fully defined, let alone available for you to work on.
Several weeks or months pass, and you have your software designed, implemented, and passing all of its tests, only for everything to fall apart when you finally have a chance to integrate it with the other software components and system hardware.
Just when you were thinking that you were done with your task, you now have to fix issues that could have been addressed at the start of your development cycle. Disappointing, discouraging, and all too common.
Your design goals shouldn’t be derailed just because you want to incorporate different software architectures. And, with a new cloud-based service from DornerWorks, aligned with the Open Group Future Airborne Capability Environment™ (FACE) technical standard (TS), they won’t be.
The Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE) Consortium was launched by the Open Group in 2010 with the goals to accelerate innovation, reduce acquisition costs, and provide more rapid integration of avionics software capabilities for defense programs. In 2012, the consortium released the first revision of a technical standard to help achieve these goals by promoting an open architecture that provides a level playing field to cultivate innovation and encourage interoperability.
An open architecture defines the interfaces, components, and rules for interaction between in a published standard. In order for a software component to be certified as conformant to the FACE TS, it must comply and adhere to the interactions and rules defined in the standard. This provides a greater assurance that one component or segment aligned with the FACE TS can be used with others that are also aligned to the FACE TS.
In 2018, DornerWorks certified the first open source Operating System Segment (OSS) to the FACE TS security profile, Virtuosity® Open Architecture (OA). Virtuosity provides an open source OSS for customers to quickly prototype their software, as a component developed to work with one segment aligned to the FACE TS will work with others likewise aligned.
We demonstrated the goal of interoperability at the FACE technical interchange meeting (TIM) in Sept 2018. However, we also recognized that a possible hurdle to use Virtuosity OA was access to embedded platforms, which are not always easy or affordable to obtain. Many development programs face this same problem; the lack of a target hardware, particularly at the beginning of a project.
With this in mind, DornerWorks is taking the FACE™ technical standard to the cloud.
We will provide development and execution environment as a service that runs on cloud assets, like Amazon’s E2C instances or other more secure solutions when needed. We will do this by implementing an open source OSS that will align to the FACE TS, and add tools to enable you to develop, test, and check the conformance of your software. This enables:
We will be working with FACE verification authorities to develop tools to help automate the creation of a certification package to send to a verification authority (VA) to certify your software. Our goal is to automate to the point where a single click of a button will generate, collate, and deliver a certification package to your VA, becoming practically self-certifying, and reducing the time and cost to you.
Best of all, you don’t have to become an expert on the FACE technical standard to be able to take advantage of the benefits it brings.
We plan to have a FACE environment aligned to the General Purpose Profile (GPP), version 3.0, ready for deployment later this year. We will initially focus on support for Portable Components Segment (PCS) development and conformance testing. Subsequent versions will add:
Virtuosity OA is your low cost, open source solution for designing, developing, and prototyping in the FACE environment. We are now taking all of that and adding easy accessibility. Anyone with a computer and an internet connection will be able to develop products aligned with the FACE technical standard.
If this venture excites you and you are interested in becoming an early adopter, contact us today and schedule a meeting.
We’ll see you in the cloud!
