5 take-aways from 5 years of Snaps for IoT

[picchietti]

@svet

There are the occasional glitches, and half-documented features, but these don’t usually lead to critical issues. The fact that there is a free service that hooks into GitHub and automatically packages and distributes snaps for multiple architectures has been quite pleasing

I’m curious to know if you think you’ve had less glitches on the github/launchpad setup versus locally building the snap? I’ve also experienced some flakiness building on a raspberry pi 4b (4gb). I’m suspicious that its due to running out of memory, which probably wouldn’t happen on launchpad.

@svet

I find it unfortunate that strict confinement plays such a major role in Ubuntu Core’s marketing material … but I fail to see how it meaningfully improves security in an IoT context

Strict confinement keeps applications in a box, away from other applications or the base os (unless in defined interactions). This allows Ubuntu Core to have an immutable base os which is great for security and stability because it limits the scope of damage if an application is vulnerable. Strict confinement also allows updates to be applied more confidently which is good for security too. You might be able to find more reasons in the Ubuntu Core security whitepaper.

@svet

and figuring out the necessary plug/slot setup … always feels like a ritual to the sun gods.

I feel you there. Some supported interfaces have a single sentence describing them and there are many, many interfaces to search through.

@svet

the package sizes are generally quite large

Have you tried the new lzo compression?

@svet

we now disable the snapd service altogether, and only do updates on-demand in a more controlled manner

Could you leverage the new snapcraft refresh hold?

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Thank you for sharing your experiences!