[berebere]

Instead of building the entire stack using (OS + K8) why not use Azure IoTEdge or AWS Greengrass for fleet management? These services seem to have solved a lot of the problems (low-footprint, redundancy, cloud management) already.

[rektide]

Picking standard open source starting places seems like a more than obvious move.

Saying you want to invest in ongoing intense data-driven store innovation, then building the whole thing atop a platform that you cannot rely on (may get discontinued, price may become huge, may become a barrier to technical innovation), that you dont control seems like an obviously bad move.

Finding smart people, rolling up your sleeves, & recognizing this as a core competency, an enabler, a driver of your business, & not outsourcing the problems, is the right move. If future teams do a better job building edge kubernetes, there should also be good portability.

[klysm]

Cloud services like those tend to be limited in annoying ways. Also sometimes they simply vanish (@google). The lock in is also a negative.

[throwawaaarrgh]

The lock in isn't a negative, it's just a cost. If you didn't build it yourself, that was a time and expertise savings. If they go away, you either just use the other vendor, or you have to pay for the time and expertise now, which you would have been paying anyway if you didn't use the vendored solution to begin with.

[klysm]

> The lock in isn't a negative, it's just a cost.

> just use the other vendor,

The point of lock in is to make it not a “just” to use a different vendor.

I also disagree with characterizing it as a cost. It is a negative because of its risk.

[barbazoo]

And they mention that in the article, too.