BalenaOS is an open-source embedded Linux OS supporting 90+ boards. That's 90+ balenaOS releases being built, tested, and released by GitHub Actions without any human intervention.

With hundreds of versions, high stakes, and reliability being crucial factors in IoT industry, how exactly do we release balenaOS not as fast as possible but as confidently as possible (ACAP)?

This is where a hardware-in-the-loop (HiTL) pipeline built with GitHub Runners comes in the clutch to test software end-to-end on actual devices using an open hardware test harness (jig) called Autokit.

In this talk, we dive deeper into GitHub actions for building an efficient hardware-in-the-loop pipeline. How it helped scale our toolchain to develop an OS, test it, debug it, and eventually release it to production effectively in hours, freeing weeks of manual testing done by our engineers. And, we will explain all this and more by taking you on a journey. From a GitHub pull request to release, exploring each step of the way.