Ubuntu Core 22 is now available – optimised for IoT and embedded devices

You can make a boot-enviroment-snapshot for active/backup.

If anything goes wrong you boot backup, then again snapshot and repeat. That way you don't need anything more then apt/pkg etc.

>it's their long term goal

Why do you know that?

>everyone needs more money

But canonical need's more employees first...but please good ones ;)

"Refresh control can be accomplished by using a gating snap"

I bet those only come from brand stores.. so $20k/year for an ability to disable updates?

I still don't think the pricing makes sense for anything that doesn't have a solid plan and a sales team. If you graph the cost per device / month it'll be free for 10 users, then a huge jump when you need a paid plan, then an increasing slope until you hit the peak at $14.39 per device / month on the Production plan, then a decreasing slope trending towards $1.00 per device / month (for essentials).

In something like the digital signage market, where IoT device management makes sense, I can buy hosted solutions that include the signage SaaS for around $10 per device / month. On Balena Pilot I'd be paying $6.50 per device / month (initially) and competing against large providers who have costs closer to $1.

The pricing page looks even worse than that at a glance. The thing I see immediately is $1439 / month for 100 devices. The plan is named Production and it's the only one where I can calculate the per device cost without thinking (divide by 100), so it gives me the expectation of $15 per device / month until I read the fine print and pull out a calculator to figure out an actual cost average based on projections.

My gut reaction after spending 5 minutes on the pricing page is that I would need to get into the range of 500 devices before I could be cost competitive unless I'm in a specialized market where I can justify charging a really large monthly fee per device.

A hobbyist trying to deploy a few dozen devices is probably going to have a tough time doing cost recovery in the beginning. If someone is trying to manage a couple dozen devices as a pure cost (just simplified maintenance), I think it would take a lot to justify moving away from doing things manually. I deal with a lot of small business network devices and I value a firmware update on a network device as 3 minutes of labor.

I also have a huge dislike for tiered features and functionality, but that's endemic to the tech industry in general and I can't imagine any established companies being able to move away from it. The reason I dislike it is that anything I would build would be on the scale of a weekend side project and I feel like I have to adjust my strategy based on the scale of my project. For example, I might start with manual device management to keep costs low initially and then move through the different tiers of something like Balena as I grow.

Compared to something like the old Mender pricing where IIRC it was a linear cost per device with all features included and a minimum cost of $10 per month, the current pricing, scaling, and tiering strategies are awful for small developers. I know anything I build as a side project has a limited chance of being successful. I don't want to pre-plan a cost minimizing scaling strategy, but I don't want to YOLO it and hope for the best if if I end up with something successful.

What I'd want out of a platform like Balena is a setup where I can just build the best solution on day one and throw money at it to scale if it becomes necessary. However, the reality is I'll probably end up stuck in those low scale scenarios I described above, so, IMHO, that pricing is built for you to make money off of me failing, not for mutual benefit.

To be fair, I assume Mender couldn't sustain their old pricing, but I think platforms like Cloudflare could make that kind of pricing more tenable in the future. At least I hope so.

Maybe severely was the wrong word to use. I use RPi's in my home lab so any impact no matter how significant is limited in real world impact. In this case it was limited to loss of access to several services in my home lab for a few hours due to a complete loss of network connectivity to the server and a few hours of my time troubleshooting the issue.

The major issue was caused by moving some of the kernel modules to linux-modules-extra package. It caused an issue when I upgraded because the 8021q module needed for vlan support was moved to this package. I lost network connectivity to the first Pi I upgraded due to this. The Pi in question had an ip address assigned to the interface and to vlans configured for the interface. When networkd could not create the vlans on the interface it failed without assigning the ip address to the interface itself. I filed a ticket regarding this.

I consider the ability to use vlans to be a fairly basic expectation of a server os especially when it previously worked out of the box. I would also think vlan support to be an expected feature for the IoT gateway role pushed as appropriate for Ubuntu Core. Luckily I was able to connect to the serial console, troubleshoot and eventually correct the issue. When the module which supports a commonly used part of the ethernet family of protocols is moved to an optional package, I would expect testing of the impact to connectivity to existing deployments to take place. This led me to lose some faith in the testing done of Ubuntu on the RPi and the stability of the platform going forward. Switching platforms was easy to do in my case and so I did.

Hopefully the recommendations I made in my ticket of either moving the module back to linux-modules or adding an explicit warning to the release notes happens. The current warning regarding some modules having been moved to linux-modules-extra, without any detailing of them including the functionality they tie back to, is completely inadequate.