Managing a Fleet of Global IoT Devices (The Easy Way)

Low cost, readily-available devices like the Raspberry Pi, Jetson Nano, and BeagleBone products have made prototyping IoT projects extremely simple for developers.  Engineers can have functioning solutions quickly, without breaking the bank.  However, there is a very important step that is often overlooked when embarking on a new IoT project:  Device and Fleet Management.

While it’s cheap and easy to get started with IoT, once you exceed more than a handful of devices, and those devices are no longer on your desk, how do you continue to interact, manage, and maintain those devices?  How do you deploy updated applications to them, if the devices end up located all over the globe?  And how do you minimize downtime, or avoid traveling to the device to troubleshoot when things go wrong?

In this talk, we’ll take a look at best practices for IoT Fleet Management, introduce balenaCloud as one platform and methodology to help with this task, and cover some lessons learned maintaining fleets of IoT devices at scale.

More specifically, we will investigate:

• Hardware selection
• OS considerations
• Workload segmentation
• Containerization
• Application updates
• OS updates
• Sample use-cases

Attendees will not need any specific knowledge or previous experience, but familiarity with Linux, Containers, and some Hardware fundamentals would be helpful to have.