SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the I-need-a-new-IoT...-and-make-it-Snappy! dept.
Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
Snappy, a software deployment and management system designed by Canonical for the Ubuntu operating system, could be a shortcut to building trusted IoT applications.
The first rule of building a secure and feature-rich ecosystem is software management — push and pull software updates and software discovery through an app store mechanism from a trusted source.
In the go-to-market IoT race, though, that often doesn't happen. Many Internet of Things (IoT) product developers have ignored the traumatic early history of Microsoft Windows, Android and web platforms, and expoits of IoT devices — because software updates have not been designed in — are regularly reported.
Those earlier platforms have been hardened, updates have been automated, and the app discovery and installation have been made trustworthy. IoT developers need to follow their lead.
Snappy, a software deployment and package management system designed and built by Canonical for the Ubuntu operating system, could be a shortcut to building a trusted IoT application.
The Ubuntu-Core required to integrate Snappy software management system uses 612MB, and snapd, the endpoint software management service needed to interact with Snappy, uses 15MB. The IoT device would need 627MB-plus memory for the IoT app called a snap. Because of memory and computational constraints, it is not a solution for ultra-low-power, small memory microcontroller devices but would work with 32-bit devices like the Raspberry Pi. Nevertheless, a review of Snappy is worth the time because it clearly explains a fairly complete approach to the problem of trusted software management and distribution.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 26 2017, @12:26AM
I spent a few years in this segment. Believe it or not there *is* a decent market for customization on the fly sort of app store download like firmware. They all want 'I plug it into a modbus and a can bus at the same time' not that you would really do that.... As you know the space is fairly limited. So a 2 gig distro with 600MB patches are a non starter (especially on dataplans that cap out at 5-50 meg per month). But a 10 meg download and the box suddenly has extra functionality is very appealing.
We spent a lot of time and money on R&D on that exact market segment. The the main company pulled the plug. Not because it was unprofitable (it was doing very well). But that it was not profitable enough and corp politics. Limited hardware SKU was very appealing to IoT re-sellers. Plus it was cool as hell to transform a modbus demo into a gpio pin device in under 30 mins and at min cost and software update. All with the same box. We tried to hit 5MB for the whole thing. Less if we could manage it as even 5MB was too much. This was maybe 3-5 years ago. It was pretty obvious general computing was storming all the way down to the lowest levels. It was not a mater of if, but when.
600+ meg. *sigh* The guys who get stuck with that device will have a nasty surprise when they try to plug it into an AT&T or Verizon. The cost margin will explode and their profits will be gone and the project DOA. Maybe in 5-10 years.