[lawik]

No. It is not necessary. I don't think I said it was.

You can absolutely simulate more IoT-devices. But in this case I don't have to simulate receiving OTA updates, rebooting, keeping state. It has some upside but it isn't the reason I've done it.

I think I mentioned that in both this and the previous piece that I started out doing the VMs for fun and that's still kind of the central point. "What can I do with 192 cores?" We'll have a good use of the artifacts of this work for testing the framework itself in ways where devices are useful.

As you say, if I wanted to stress-test the OTA service for real I could definitely just set up some libraries to make multiple connections instead of starting the whole machinery. You can make a lot more connections, throw a lot more work at the system. And depending on how fancy you want to get you can simulate a lot of device behavior.

Given that I happened to have a couple of thousand full-fidelity devices in my pocket we got some incidental testing of the service.

[yetihehe]

Ohh, so you are testing end hubs as vm's on that server? Each instance is like another end device? That was hard to say from linked article and 5000 connections suggested that you are using vm for each connection on your iot server.