Particle reliability as of 4/2016

Cloud
1

Hey,

I’ve been testing particle platform for the last months and it brings many interesting and good things to development. I’m creating second version of our current remote monitoring/management system and it seems if I go all the way with Particle I would be touching pretty much every Particle cloud function available. With the previous product version we’ve already built LAMP stack which acts currently as the end point. So now I’m trying to evaluate if we should go with particle cloud or stick to our own stack with TCP client or some mix of these.

Basically our system sends data every 5 minutes to the cloud from 5-20 sensors/touchscreens depending on a device. For this I was thinking of using particle.publish() and then webhooks to send the data to our database server to be logged.

Secondly I’d be using function calls to trigger some actions for the device remotely (turn some devices on/off for example).

Thirdly I need to be able to send timer(s) (max 100 char long string per timer) daily to the device for which I was thinking of using particle.subscribe on the device end to receive the data.

So far I haven’t been able to start long time testing with electron but will be doing that during the upcoming weeks. We’re trying to get the product into production around August.

My main question is what’s the stability of the Particle cloud and all the small parts associated with it? If we have thousands of devices, can we trust that webhooks(and other parts) will be stable and everything should work as expected or are there still too many bugs which occur from time to time?

Basically I’ve been trying to read from the community threads as much as possible and my understanding is that everything mostly works but there are still some hiccups every now and then and also some new bugs introduced in new firmwares? Also what’s the roadmap for the upcoming months, where the focus will be?

2

What I have seen over the past few weeks from reading the forums is that your Webhooks can stop working and have to deleted and enabled again to get them working. Nobody knows why this has happened to many different people. That worries me considering I’m wanting to use these devices in consumer products also.

I have read about firmware being loaded onto the wrong device by accident.

I have read about Photons & Electrons being owned by different people in different states resetting at the almost exact same time, again so far nobody knows why that is happening yet although I think it should be in the logs.

Overall I think the platform is pretty stable but it’s not perfect just yet. I know our goal is to have as little headaches as possible after the product is sold.

The good news is that the support community here is about as good as it gets so getting help is usually pretty easy.

3

The focus right now is on stability improvements across the board. We love that the community is able to help us find the root cause of issues so we can fix them quicker.

In terms of data ingestion, webhooks is the way to go. Reliability is going to improve in the following months.

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