> Android devices are really low system administration high availability Linux systems
Low maintenance partially because they are functionally very limited ( much of what the kernel and userspace can do is locked-out) and partially because the mission-critical stuff lives in seldom-updated firmware.
High availability... Given how often 'reboot your phone' or ' clear the app data' is given as advice?
I just don't see many parallels with server environments.
I have never cleared app data and seldom reboot, neither in Nexus nor Cyanogen, despite beta-testing a lot of stuff. I just asked my wife, she never did these things on Motorola's and Sony's "roms". Are you sure that these events are that popular?
Clearing user or app data is not required when doing OTA updates on Android.
The partitions that get updating are completely separate from user data. This myth keeps spreading for some reason though...
The only time user data gets wiped is when unlocking the bootloader which is a very valid security feature in order to prevent bootkits and data theft. It gives big clear warnings to backup your data before doing so.
Mine Samsung S4 mini reboots by itself once in a few days. Hadn't bothered to catch the reasons. And it surely knows how to hang itself for half a minute when doing large app updates or otherwise IO-heavy operations.
While the devil is certainly in the details, I think an android device would be more akin to a specific docker container running some sort of app.
A limited functionality device that services a specific purpose, if we were to take it to the world of the web, would be a webservice.
If you were having a problem with one of your puppet&co managed web servers on some cloud host, would you:
a. perform root cause analysis.
b. redeploy the entire machine because fuck it, you have your recipes or whatever and spinning up a new instance is a super cheap operation.
That's what I read into when I think about the grandparent.
Low maintenance partially because they are functionally very limited ( much of what the kernel and userspace can do is locked-out) and partially because the mission-critical stuff lives in seldom-updated firmware.
High availability... Given how often 'reboot your phone' or ' clear the app data' is given as advice?
I just don't see many parallels with server environments.