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The CoreOS Update Philosophy

coreos.com

We used Omaha at Rockmelt for both Mac and Windows, but of course we had to write our own backend since Google doesn't open source that part. I assume you guys had to do the same?

Which repo contains the update server? I found https://github.com/coreos/go-omaha but it's just the protocol.

There is an open-source implementation [1] of the server within the CoreOS SDK [2], but it's only meant for development.

A different closed-source code base runs in production that handles scale.

[1] https://github.com/coreos/dev-util/blob/master/devserver.py [2] http://coreos.com/docs/sdk-distributors/sdk/modifying-coreos...

Very interested to hear about your usage of Omaha...

How was your overall experience? What's your process for promoting a release? Do you ship in channels per platform? What steps does your updater take when it installs a package?

We used channels but only to separate our internal builds.

All our externally released versions were on a single channel (well, one channel for Mac, another for Windows as I recall). We released a new version by rolling it out to 1% of our users and watching the crash rate, then 5%, etc, till we were at 100%.

Our 1.0 product was based on Chromium, so we mostly re-used Chromium code on the client-side (Mac, Windows) as far as how the updater worked.

Sounds like a similar situation on our side. We use a minimally modified updater from ChromeOS and have built some tools into the Omaha server to do rate-limited updates to the population of machines and track error rates in the same fashion.

FreeBSD offers an embedded version called nanobsd that seems to use the same update "philosophy".

It's actually nanobsd.sh, a shell script by Poul-Henning Kamp. So, that IS open source, although I doubt it's GPL ;)

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=nanobsd

Here I was hoping to actually read about the update philosophies, but the linked page contains almost no content other than to say that Docker has been updated.

If you're actually looking to read about them, they can be found here: http://coreos.com/using-coreos/updates/

Yes. We changed the url to that from https://coreos.com/blog/the-coreos-update-philosophy/.

Sorry about that! If you've got questions about it, feel free to ask in this thread and we'll cover them.

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