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VDC Overview

Welcome to the Validation DevOps Center (VDC)

What is VDC?

The Validation DevOps Center (VDC) is a unified platform designed to support Intel employees across the entire enterprise validation value stream. It provides a holistic, all-connected approach to managing validation processes, allowing users to search, view, download, build, test, and deploy various ingredients such as software, firmware, and emulation for both pre-silicon and post-silicon validation use cases.

Core Vs Business Capabilities

VDC's capabilities are divided into two main types: Core and Business. Core capabilities are the foundational building blocks that are agnostic to specific business needs, providing the essential services required to implement business-specific capabilities. Business capabilities, on the other hand, are tailored solutions that address specific aspects of the validation business, ensuring productivity and efficiency.

Ingredients & Releases

Ingredients are central to VDC's operations. Each ingredient, whether software or hardware, is uniquely identified and managed through Ingredient Releases. These releases include version information, metadata, and optionally, associated artifacts and work items (changes). Users can search for ingredients, compare releases, download specific versions, and access detailed information consistently across various business-specific ingredients. Users can see for each ingredient and release which ingredient and releases are using it.

Work Items

We call work-items all the tickets based items we have in HSD-ES and JIRA. These could be bugs, enhancements, features, workarounds, sighting and pre-sightings. These work-items span across different tools (mostly HSD-ES & JIRA) and even within the same tool may span across multiple Tenants (HSD-ES) or Projects (Jira). VDC provide a uniform lightweight approach to bring all of the items under the same roof. VDC provide full traceability between ingredient releases to their list of changes and from a specific change to the list of ingredient releases that contain it either directly or in directly.

Workflows

VDC automates day-to-day business processes through workflows that encompass three main types of business stages: Build, Deploy, and Test. These stages can be combined in various ways to achieve different business flows, tailored to meet specific business needs through specialized plugins. (New Capability in Q3'2024)

Projects

Projects in VDC represent collections of ingredients, workflows, and users working towards a common goal. There are no restrictions on what constitutes a project, allowing users to organize their work in a way that best suits their needs. Projects provide clear data boundaries, ensuring that entities within different projects are uniquely identified.

Unified Patch and IFWI Capabilities

VDC supports users in finding and managing official *code, CORES Firmware, and Unified Patches for both server and client silicons. It also allows for the creation of custom unified patches and supports building new engineering IFWIs with predefined or ad hoc settings. The platform tracks changes and provides insights, enhancing the overall management and deployment process.

Why Choose VDC?

VDC brings several advantages to the table:

  1. Centralized Platform: VDC offers a single, user-friendly interface for all validation operations, eliminating the need to switch between different tools
  2. Scalability and Reliability: Hosted on Microsoft Azure, VDC offers 99.99% availability and can easily scale as new users are onboarded
  3. Shorten Debug Time : VDC enables users to find all ingredients in one place with full traceability and history of different releases along with their associated bugs. This comprehensive visibility allows users to conduct quick experiments and build what they need to expedite bug root cause analysis.
  4. Increased Productivity : VDC's intuitive user interface is designed to understand business needs, allowing users to focus on business-related activities without requiring deep DevOps knowledge in CI/CD tools and infrastructure. This abstraction significantly boosts productivity.
  5. Simplified Authorization: With a unified AGS group for read-only operations and project-specific groups for write operations, VDC streamlines the authorization process
  6. Consistent Features: New features and capabilities are rolled out across all business domains simultaneously, improving development time and consistency.

Conclusion

The Validation DevOps Center (VDC) is a comprehensive, scalable, and efficient platform designed to meet the diverse needs of Intel's validation processes. By centralizing operations, simplifying authorization, and ensuring consistent feature deployment, VDC significantly enhances productivity and efficiency for all its users.

Welcome to the future of validation with VDC!