How do you handle different "environments"

General Discussions
1

Interested in how you approach different “environments”. For example, we have a bunch of “sandbox” devices that we deploy images onto during development. We’d like to keep these separate from “production” devices in the field. We used hosted mender.

Ideas I have so far:

  • Different hosted mender accounts for each environment
  • Different “device types”

How have others approached this?

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2

Interested into the same ! For now all the devices are mixed into a single group which led to some issues already.

3

Hi @mnbbrown and @huguespoiget,

Thanks for reaching out! It actually depends a bit on the use case. A few strategies:

  • if users can choose the desired environment themselves, like opt-in to a beta channel, then have the devices add a property to the inventory and use that as group criterion. This needs dynamic groups.
  • different Hosted Mender accounts. This is obviously the strongest separation, but requires additional coordination, and devices don’t move that easily between environments.
  • different device types are an interesting approach too. Especially if there are “debug builds” being deployed to those or the sandbox devices have additional hardware facilities, then this is a good way to go.
  • multi-tenancy is on the roadmap, so in the long run it might solve the problem in the future, but its not available yet :frowning:

If you have a very specific need or use case, happy to discuss that!

Greets,
Josef

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