True, Yocto is not technically an update solution! We explained it as such to try and keep our post a little shorter, but perhaps we oversimplified a bit too much there. What we probably meant to say is "the Yocto ecosystem".
We mention Yocto and internal tooling rather than other competitors because they're what we hear most often. We would have loved to include more discussion about why were better than other solutions, but it would have made our post a little unwieldy.
It'd be great to hear a comparison of when you'd want to use Deviceplane vs something like mender.io or updatehub.io. I'm a great fan of the A/B dual image update strategy because it's simple, atomic and resilient to errors or loss of power during an update. Does Deviceplane still provide some of those assurances or would I want to use Deviceplane in conjunction with something like Mender?
I deploy updates on IoT devices that are unattended and can only afford minimal downtime. If an interrupted update (due to loss of network connectivity or power) caused a device to be unreachable/unupdateable it would be bad. I'd also be concerned with using DevicePlane as it's presented because I'd have no way of updating the device's kernel version that I first deploy with.
We mention Yocto and internal tooling rather than other competitors because they're what we hear most often. We would have loved to include more discussion about why were better than other solutions, but it would have made our post a little unwieldy.
I have a comparison between us and Balena here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22173350.
What other tools did you have in mind? It'd be great to discuss this more!