Case study

Intelligent BIOS Mass-Update & Fleet Management Microservice

The Problem:

Maintaining system-wide firmware health across large hardware fleets is a notoriously slow and high-risk process. IT teams faced significant manual overhead in identifying the correct BIOS versions, resolving server-side load-balancing issues, and ensuring that update scripts were compatible with diverse machine configurations, often leading to critical system errors or downtime.

Our Solution:

To engineer a sophisticated microservice architecture that automates the entire firmware lifecycle. We developed specialized subservices—including a custom DNS-based address resolver, an FTP filesystem indexer, and a dynamic script generator—that work in tandem to safely retrieve, validate, and deploy BIOS updates at scale across thousands of machines.

Technology Stack:

Python (FastAPI), C#, PostgreSQL, Celery, FTP/HTTPS Proxies

Key Results & Value:

Fully Automated Firmware Lifecycle: Streamlined the update process from discovery to deployment, eliminating the need for manual intervention and reducing human error.
100% Reliable File Resolution: Solved DNS load-balancing bottlenecks with a custom subservice that filters out “bad” FTP hosts, ensuring constant access to firmware files.
Rapid Deployment Cycles: Implemented a proxy-based driver indexer and dynamic script generator to accelerate the speed of manifest retrieval and deployment preparation.
Proactive Fleet Health: A centralized scheduling system ensures all hardware remains up-to-date with the latest security patches and performance improvements on a consistent timeline.
Scalable Microservice Design: Built a modular system using FastAPI and Celery that handles high-concurrency requests and large-scale data processing effortlessly.

The problem:

Keeping your systems up-to-date is a complicated and slow process. Besides that, a myriad of problems can occur during the process.

Key features:

Address resolver service: a custom solution to a DNS load-balancing problem that presented during initial assessment. It involves a subservice that does specific DNS resolution and checking of the FTP servers to ensure bad hosts are filtered out.

FTP filesystem indexer service: a subservice that given an operational IP address does an indexing of the FTP filesystem of the vendor server that contains BIOS files

Driver indexer service: a subservice that does driver indexation based on manifest files retrieved from the indexed filesystem using a proxy HTTPS for speed

Script generator service: a subservice that generates scripts dynamically based on information provided by the stakeholders

Scheduling system: a scheduling system that operates the subservices to provide constant updating of the microservice data based on certain timelines

Fast API: based API that provides the subservices functionalities to the stakeholders

Solution:

We have developed a microservice to mass-update the BIOS of all your machines: It is automatic, secure, and painless. Combining the use of subservices developed using Python, PostgreSQL, and Celery, we have created a robust pipeline that allows you to remotely provide updates to the computers in your network.

With our dynamically generated installation scripts, you can customize your installation to fit your specific needs and requirements, and easily perform the installation of new updates. Forget about manually updating your devices through manual input. With the scheduling function, updates can be programmed and executed at optimal times. No more dealing with down-time when it’s time to update. Automate your updates, and don’t let your systems be outdated ever again.

Salma Nichols

CEO, TransBIOS

We consider Insoftex’s most significant success to be their ability to stay within budget while delivering high-quality work. We’ve asked them to build a complex project, and they’re fully capable of completing the work.