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Why bootc?

At Mehal Technologies are very impressed with bootable containers (bootc)

It's enabled us to support our partners smart edge solutions and helps them deliver features and patches faster.

To give an idea of the time savings lets look at a typical SaaS based edge operating system builder and compare that to bootc.

In the comparison below we see an 80% improvement in effort - Going from 2 deployments a day at best to 2 builds an hour as standard.

Traditional Cloud Build System

Traditional Cloud Build Systems

The times on the above diagram are fair and may even be a little light.

  • For Package Customization we only considered updating an already existing package not building a package server and building a new custom package for it which would likely take a day or more work.

  • With system builds we found that cloud providers work with shared resources so generating the ISO for download can take up to an hour.

  • Once the builds are complete the ISOs have to be downloaded and again there is usually throttling and/or contention.

  • And finally for provisioning the ISO needs to be flashed to a USB drive and then the operating system needs to be configured and validated.

So it's around 170+ mins from change to deploy.

Container Based Operating System

Modern Cloud Build Systems

The times on the above diagram will vary on the build time of the app you're deploying but match what we see during delivery.

  • Package builds are light weight and container based so our dev team doesn't need any legacy packaging skills.

  • The use of base images means that a whole ISO doesn't need to be created on each build so the time to build and make available is greatly reduced.

  • For downloads containers have a layering strategy which ensures only the top layers are delivered as necessary

  • Once the device has been provisioned for the first time updates can be synced automatically seriously reducing the amount of time compared to the flash/configure/validate.

Hopefully that's convinced you to adopt bootc for your smart device edge solutions and if you do we believe the tools in ubiquitous factory will help you accelerate even more.