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Launch HN: Deviceplane (YC W20) – Update and Manage Devices Running Linux

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Re: Launch HN: Deviceplane (YC W20) – Update and Manage Devices Running Linux

#41

Post by joshwget »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #34
robotmay wrote: post #33

My biggest pain point with Balena in my previous job was that it used Docker; it's unfortunate that most of the solutions in this space (including Deviceplane) seem to do so. It's not really ideal in a number of installations to be pulling down 1GB Docker images simultaneously from 20 devices when you push an update. I'd be really interested in seeing a system based around Git and something like buildpacks instead. I…

> It's not really ideal in a number of installations to be pulling down 1GB Docker images simultaneously from 20 devices when you push an update. That seems like a really big image? Alpine-based images in my experience tend to be under 100MB. But I would be fascinated to use p2p for distributing image layers; it feels like that shouldn't be too hard? EDIT: it's been done, apparently:) https://blog.bonner.is/docker-re…

We see Alpine used in production less than most people think. People usually feel more comfortable writing a Dockerfile based on Debian or Ubuntu because those are what they're familiar with. In most cases it's worth the one-time cost of pulling the bigger base image, but it all depends on the use case.

Another common reason for large images is the Nvidia ecosystem. Most of the images that Nvidia publish can get close to 1GB. However, these should only need to be pulled to devices once until you need to upgrade the base image.

Re: Launch HN: Deviceplane (YC W20) – Update and Manage Devices Running Linux

#42

Post by cyrusroshan »

joshwget wrote: post #36
guptaneil wrote: post #32

Congrats on the launch! This is perfectly timed since I’m currently evaluating device management solutions for Hiome’s IoT device fleet ( https://hiome.com ) Currently, we use Mender (mender.io) but are considering switching. Pros for Mender: * great pricing for consumer products at around $0.50/device/mo * lets us keep using Raspbian on our Raspberry Pi fleet The cons however are that we are stuck with Raspberry Pi…

Thanks! > However, as far as I can tell, you only support application updates, not OS-level updates. For now this is true. People using Deviceplane today upgrade their underlying OS via the mechanism provided by their distro. On Debian-based systems this means running something like `apt-get dist-upgrade`. Deviceplane provides the tools to rollout this upgrade across your devices, but we're not hands-on past that. We…

To add on to what Josh said, re: OS updates, we have functionality for bulk scripting (https://deviceplane.com/docs/operating/command-scripting/) to help you roll out host-level updates to your devices.

We're also interested in hearing your thoughts on pricing, shoot us founders@deviceplane.com, and let's talk about it!

Re: Launch HN: Deviceplane (YC W20) – Update and Manage Devices Running Linux

#43

Post by joshwget »

veeralpatel979 wrote: post #11

Congrats on launching, and thank you for open sourcing! I've added your codebase to my list of open source React/Go applications to check out. 1. Do you worry that open sourcing will make it difficult for you to monetize? 2. Can you describe your tech stack more? 3. How long has your team been working on this?

1. We don't! We suspect that many companies running devices in production would rather pay for a hosted version of Deviceplane than have to maintain their own self-hosted install. We also offer support subscriptions of self-hosted installs.

2. If I had to summarize in one word, Golang. Our backend, agent, and CLI are all written in Go.

Frontend is React + a custom component library we maintain.

On the infrastructure side it's quite simple: RDS, containers running on ECS, and an ALB load balancer. We built Deviceplane to be simple to host and since we just run the open source version it means our own infrastructure is simple.

3. We've been working on this since around August!

Re: Launch HN: Deviceplane (YC W20) – Update and Manage Devices Running Linux

#44

Post by [deleted] »

robotmay wrote: post #33

My biggest pain point with Balena in my previous job was that it used Docker; it's unfortunate that most of the solutions in this space (including Deviceplane) seem to do so. It's not really ideal in a number of installations to be pulling down 1GB Docker images simultaneously from 20 devices when you push an update. I'd be really interested in seeing a system based around Git and something like buildpacks instead. I…

[deleted]

Re: Launch HN: Deviceplane (YC W20) – Update and Manage Devices Running Linux

#45

Post by joshwget »

robotmay wrote: post #33

My biggest pain point with Balena in my previous job was that it used Docker; it's unfortunate that most of the solutions in this space (including Deviceplane) seem to do so. It's not really ideal in a number of installations to be pulling down 1GB Docker images simultaneously from 20 devices when you push an update. I'd be really interested in seeing a system based around Git and something like buildpacks instead. I…

Can you talk more about what kind of use case you had where the average update took 1GB?

I can certainly see how pulling a base image could require that kind of download size, but subsequent updates should only need to pull the layers that have changed.

Re: Launch HN: Deviceplane (YC W20) – Update and Manage Devices Running Linux

#46

Post by pottertheotter »

guptaneil wrote: post #32

Congrats on the launch! This is perfectly timed since I’m currently evaluating device management solutions for Hiome’s IoT device fleet ( https://hiome.com ) Currently, we use Mender (mender.io) but are considering switching. Pros for Mender: * great pricing for consumer products at around $0.50/device/mo * lets us keep using Raspbian on our Raspberry Pi fleet The cons however are that we are stuck with Raspberry Pi…

Hiome looks cool, but that's quite the expensive occupancy sensor!

Re: Launch HN: Deviceplane (YC W20) – Update and Manage Devices Running Linux

#47

Post by zerotolerance »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #40
zerotolerance wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IPFS and decentralization don't really address artifact size issues.

It certainly improves the practical outcome; replicating layers between nodes in a rack/datacenter is way faster than pulling it down 20x from one external upstream.

Sure, but latency is not the same as size. You're talking about latency optimization via local caching. IPFS is a bit of a heavy solution compared to a simple cache. IPFS solves a totally different problem.

Re: Launch HN: Deviceplane (YC W20) – Update and Manage Devices Running Linux

#48

Post by nickysielicki »

robotmay wrote: post #33

My biggest pain point with Balena in my previous job was that it used Docker; it's unfortunate that most of the solutions in this space (including Deviceplane) seem to do so. It's not really ideal in a number of installations to be pulling down 1GB Docker images simultaneously from 20 devices when you push an update. I'd be really interested in seeing a system based around Git and something like buildpacks instead. I…

There are two existing update frameworks that work on this model, one based on ostree and another from Intel called swupd.

Re: Launch HN: Deviceplane (YC W20) – Update and Manage Devices Running Linux

#49

Post by [deleted] »

guptaneil wrote: post #32

Congrats on the launch! This is perfectly timed since I’m currently evaluating device management solutions for Hiome’s IoT device fleet ( https://hiome.com ) Currently, we use Mender (mender.io) but are considering switching. Pros for Mender: * great pricing for consumer products at around $0.50/device/mo * lets us keep using Raspbian on our Raspberry Pi fleet The cons however are that we are stuck with Raspberry Pi…

[deleted]

Re: Launch HN: Deviceplane (YC W20) – Update and Manage Devices Running Linux

#50

Post by shandor »

joshwget wrote: post #19
jackhalford wrote: post #18

I tried to enroll a server into deviceplane but there is a hard requirement on systemd. Are there any plans in the future to support more linux distributions?

Our agent will support nearly any Linux distro, even though our installation script only supports systemd at the moment. We've really wanted to add OpenRC support to our installation script for a while but haven't gotten to it yet. If you know your init system well, you could always write your own service file. Here's the unit file for systemd as a reference: https://github.com/deviceplane/deviceplane/blob/master/ins…

> nearly any Linux distro

The service file for systemd looks pretty simple, so that's probably not a problem to port to some other init system.

But what's in the "nearly" above, do you have some other concrete requirements for the distro? Any technical reason very small busybox-based systems would be unable to support your agent?

Deviceplane sounds like a very good idea for a niche that really needs something like it!

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