Mender blog

During 2015 we spent a lot of time talking to users and companies in the embedded space. Our early findings which continued to be confirmed during the market research showed that 50% of all connected devices had no way to be remotely updated. Besides some outliers, the other 50% had homegrown solutions to do over-the-air updates (OTA). Common for almost all homegrown solutions were their fragili...

With the advent of IoT and the proliferation of connected embedded devices across a variety of industry verticals, a large share of devices in development are based on Linux of one form or another due to their prevalence of low-cost boards with ready-made Linux distributions. Easily and cheaply acquiring hardware, building custom code, connecting the devices to other peripherals and the internet a...

Python is one of the most popular programming languages used today and it has been around for more than 2 decades. It is commonly used in the development of applications for IoT and especially in the early stages of product development while developers might still be evaluating projects. The reason for its popularity is because Python is easy and quick to develop, for example the logic is closer...

A Docker container packages applications in containers by virtualizing the operating system and dividing it into compartments to run applications. Powerful CPU-based devices can leverage virtualization to enable containers. Containers are easy to manage due to their atomic nature, enable more efficient use of system resources, faster delivery cycle and provide a nice layer of isolation. Microsoft...

As the number of connected devices increase, the operations and infrastructure needed to support continuous updates at scale is growing fast. Deploying to a large fleet of connected devices in the field with thousands or tens of thousands, can pose a significant risk of something going wrong.

Regardless of how well tested the software and update process is, you will only know how well the deployment works after it has been released into the field. Differences in time zones, network latency, hardware and customer usage patterns are all potential stumbling blocks preventing new software releases from behaving as expected. These factors can be impossible to predict. A failed update will result in negative customer experience and potentially high customer support costs. Worst case, collateral and brand damage might be at stake.

With the release of Mender Enterprise, feature such as phased rollout can help greatly mitigate the risk by deploying into time-delayed phases with customizable share of the devices being updated in each phase. Additionally, schedule deployments enable to set a start time for the deployment into the future, so customers are unlikely to be interrupted by the update, and your support staff does not need to be up at night to create and observe it.