Hi,
I’m developing several apps and I really love the ease of use of the data engine. However, for my use case & security, once I place an IOT device in the field I will never be able to recall it for a firmware / software upgrade. Will the APIs exist indefinitely? Do we have guarantees from Hologram that they will continue to support these APIs in their current form? Any advice would greatly be appreciated.
Thanks and keep up the good work!
-nonoski
Any thoughts?
I think no company can guarantee they will be around, or that their services wont change forever, I am sure that is Hologram’s plan but no one can see the future. And any “guarantee” on the help forum is pretty useless anyway. What it seems like you want is a contracted service agreement which Hologram may do for enterprise customers but probably not small deployments.
The thing you can control is implementing an ability to do remote software updates on your devices, there are many reasons you may want to do this, Hologram changing their API only being one of them. For a deployed product with limited or no future access I think this is kind of a necessity.
With this ability you can at least react in the rare case Hologram changes anything on their end and more likely, fix bugs, add features, etc. as needed (I know I thought I was “done” with my software and have pushed updates about 1-2x a month the last few months so was very glad I decided to implement over-the-air updates)
Secondly if you want more control over the features / guarantees / lifecycle of your cloud endpoints you can make your own or use one of the giants services like on AWS or Google.
Thanks for the reply @AndrewGifft
We’d recommend the same thing as far as making sure you can apply some updates. Keep in mind that having the ability to do updates also allows you to apply security fixes which is generally a good practice.
As far as our policy on this, we do try to maintain backward compatibility as much as possible when it comes to API changes. That’s currently our plan for all data engine API endpoints and so those should work the same for the forseeable future but it’s hard to guarantee that forever.
If we were to make a breaking change here we would definitely make a big announcement about it and give people a lot of time to update their code before we turned anything off.
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