Our Own Staging & Device Farm at IRIS, NITK

This talk gives a brief glimpse into the open-source staging infrastructure we are building at IRIS, NITK. We’ll begin with an overview of our existing web-based staging platform, where developers can authenticate, select their active development work (such as branches or builds), and deploy isolated staging environments to test and validate their changes. We’ll touch upon how the platform integrates with development workflows, manages environment isolation, and provides visibility into deployments for rapid feedback.

We’ll then shift focus to our upcoming device farm project, currently under active development, which follows a similar approach. Developers can select their work and provision Android emulators and iOS simulators to test mobile applications remotely. We’ll discuss the early system architecture, design considerations around device lifecycle management and access, and the challenges involved in building and operating a self-hosted device farm.

The session is intended as a technical overview rather than a deep dive, offering insight into the architectural decisions, trade-offs, and practical challenges of building these tools using open-source tools, and how open-source communities can collaborate to evolve such systems further.

• How a self-hosted, web-based staging platform can let developers deploy and validate their work in isolated environments.

• An overview of the architecture behind a device farm for Android emulators and iOS simulators.

• Using automated workflows to deploy, configure, and bring down isolated staging environments on demand.

• How such platforms can be extended, contributed to, and evolved by the open-source community.