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Appliances & connectivity

The appliance is the piece of MIMICK that lives with your hardware. It's a small, headless computer you place next to your DUT, wire to the device, and put on your local network. Everything you do to that hardware from afar goes through its appliance.

What an appliance does​

An appliance sits between the MIMICK Cloud and your hardware. It:

  • Connects to your DUT over the interfaces the device exposes (serial, SPI, GPIO, relays, and more; see Peripherals & interfaces).
  • Discovers what's attached and reports it to the Cloud, so you can see and select hardware remotely.
  • Carries out the commands you send and streams the results back.

One appliance can serve many peripherals at once, and several engineers can reach it at the same time.

How it connects​

Both your CLI and the appliance dial outward to the MIMICK Cloud. The appliance opens a single outbound connection and keeps it open, and the Cloud sends your requests back down that same connection. The appliance never accepts inbound connections, and your CLI never talks to an appliance directly. Everything is brokered by the Cloud.

This is what lets MIMICK work in real labs. Because the appliance only makes outbound connections, it sits behind a firewall or NAT with no port forwarding, no static IP, and no VPN. For the bigger picture of how the CLI, Cloud, appliance, and DUT fit together, see the Overview.

The appliance lifecycle​

An appliance moves through two states:

  • Un-adopted. Fresh out of the box, an appliance has no identity and no link to any organization. It waits on the local network to be claimed.
  • Active. Once adopted, the appliance belongs to your organization and stays connected to the Cloud, ready to use.

Adoption is the one-time step that ties an appliance to your organization and gives it a secure identity. You run it from the CLI on the same network as the appliance. For the exact steps, see Getting Started.

Staying connected securely​

When an appliance is adopted, the Cloud issues it a short-lived certificate that it uses to prove who it is on every connection. The appliance renews this automatically before it expires, so an adopted appliance keeps working with no manual upkeep.