Mender blog

We are excited to release Mender 2.3 beta!

The focus for Mender 2.3 is to easily update all your device software.

This Mender release includes a ready-to-flash OTA-enabled Raspbian image, a new way to snapshot into system updates and support for generating application updates directly from the Mender server! All new features of Mender 2.3 are fully open source under the permissive Apache 2.0 license.

The key features of Mender 2.3 beta are covered below, and you can see the detailed items in the Mender 2.3.0 beta release notes.

Typically connected devices run through predictable cycles when they are unused or less used, for instance day versus night time. Times of idleness represent good opportunities to deploy a software update, as any downtime (such as a reboot) will most likely not affect users negatively.

Mender's focus on providing a robust update process makes it suitable for unattended updates, where no humans n...

Updating and deploying software to a large number of connected devices in the field with thousands or tens of thousands of devices, can pose a significant risk with negative repercussions.

Regardless of how well tested the software and update process is, you will only know how well the deployment works for your customers after it has been released into the field. Differences in time zones, netwo...

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.

Delta update is a more efficient mechanism for updating software over-the-air (OTA) when using cellular networks (e.g. 4G/LTE) which enables faster downloads and bandwidth cost savings. Mender offers the ability to generate and only deploy the difference (delta) between the software version already on the devices and the new version, on the binary level. Depending on the cellular technology and ne...