Calvin Hamus

IoT & IS ARCHITECT AT KAASM

DevOps: Continuous Deployment Using Git, Jenkins, and WinCC OA

In the IT world, you would NEVER, EVER, EVER make edits to a production system without going through the proper development quality assurance procedures. In the industrial world for some reason, it is acceptable to not test in isolated development environments for issues or changes in a production runtime system. There are many reasons for this…time, availability of tools, “know-how” etc. With the IT and OT worlds converging at an exponential pace, we want to help our industry adopt DevOps practices by showing the tools that are available now. DevOps tools can be leveraged in modern industrial data management software packages like WinCC Open Architecture.

DevOps: High-Speed Programming Unit Tests

WinCC Open Architecture (OA) has supported Unit Tests for quite a while now, however, when Siemens released version 3.16, one of the new features was High-Speed Programming. This new feature set included a tool for project documentation and the ability to auto-generate templates for faster creation of code. In this blog, we are going to look deeper at the new way to run and write Unit Tests inside of the graphical editor (GEDI).

WinCC OA: Setting up Chronograf with InfluxDB

With the release of WinCC OA 3.17, one of the newest and biggest changes is the addition of the NextGen Archiver. The NextGen Archiver runs on an InfluxDB database and is a great way to store your data. InfluxDB is one of the fastest-growing time-series databases in the market, which means there are already some fantastic tools that can be used to visualize your data coming out of WinCC OA. The tool I’m going to show today is Chronograf. Chronograf is the user interface for stand-alone instances of InfluxDB, but can also be used to inside of OA.