We're excited to share several important platform enhancements designed to improve your experience managing machines and data with Viam. Here's what's new this month.
Safer configuration management with fragment versions
Managing machine configurations at scale is complex. Without version control, updates can quickly become unmanageable, and reversing mistakes can be challenging.
If you’ve worked with fragments, you know they simplify configuration management by enabling modular, reusable setups across machines. But what happens when you need to iterate on a fragment, test changes, or roll back to a previous version?
That’s where fragment versions come in.
Fragment versions allow teams to track changes, maintain machine stability, and deploy updates with confidence. They also work seamlessly with nested fragments, making it easy to manage complex, layered configurations while maintaining version control across all dependencies. Instead of modifying a live fragment and risking unintended consequences, you can create new versions, test them in isolation via tags, and roll them out when ready.
Fragment versions provide structured version control, reducing risk and improving efficiency for a wide range of users:
- Companies managing fleets – Safe, gradual updates across machines with tracked version history and easy rollbacks.
- Developers iterating frequently – Enables fast prototyping while maintaining stability via A/B testing.
- Collaborators & open-source users – Allows controlled updates without affecting production environments.
Fragment versions allow you to track changes, maintain machine stability, and deploy updates with confidence. You can use tags (such as 'stable' or 'testing') to reference specific versions in your configurations, making it easy to implement controlled rollouts and quick rollbacks if needed.
Learn more about fragment versions in this detailed blog post from Product Manager Natalia Jacobowitz.
Enhanced data management: Hot data store
We've introduced a new data management option to enable faster queries for recently captured data. Enable the hot data store in your component's data capture method configuration in the fleet management interface to dual-write a window of the latest captured data from that component to a document database, in addition to the standard blob storage. Data is automatically deleted from the hot data store once it has expired from the configured window. Activating this feature will incur additional cloud data costs.
New enhancements for building and integrating with microcontrollers
The Micro-RDK is the Rust library that powers the lightweight version of Viam that can run on microcontrollers, like an ESP32.
Micro-RDK offline support
Micro-RDK supports connections over WiFi, but before, the WiFi network had to be accessible via the internet. Micro-RDK now supports connections over a local WiFi network that is not connected to the internet.
Micro-RDK cloud builds
When using the Micro-RDK, you'll often want to build your own firmware containing a custom combination of modules and any custom logic. It's now easier than ever to build and host your firmware, with the Micro-RDK GitHub template including a GitHub Action that builds a new artifact from a release version. You can directly put the link to the GitHub artifact in your Viam machine's OTA config to deploy it to your device over WiFi.
Micro-RDK multiple wifi network support
You can now configure multiple WiFi networks for Micro-RDK to try to connect to on startup using the Viam agent, the same way you do for viam-server.
These platform updates represent our ongoing commitment to providing you with tools that make machine configuration and data management more efficient and reliable. Whether you're managing configurations at scale with fragment versions, accessing recent data more quickly with Hot Data Store, or extending Viam's capabilities to microcontrollers with enhanced MicroRDK features, these improvements are designed to give you greater control and flexibility.
We encourage you to explore these new features and see how they can enhance your projects.
