After my first login the device did an unscheduled reboot for updates. It's like the worst feature of Windows 10, but for Linux. I think it's changeable from the command line, but that's the type of thing I'd want to control via a management portal. I started looking for device management and navigating their site makes me think I might not be the target market.
Most of the info on their site is locked behind contact us buttons. I think device management requires a personalized store which requires contacting them to have one set up manually. Also, their blog post about Ubuntu Core 18 (https://blog.ubuntu.com/2019/01/22/ubuntu-core-18-released-for-secure-reliable-iot-devices) claims "10 years low-cost security maintenance", but I can't find pricing info anywhere.
Overall it feels like they're looking for big companies with a lot of money to spend on support and value added services.
I want to build a simple hobby project to get some experience with IoT device management. I'll only set up a few devices, but want to learn how deployment to and management of those devices would work if I had a lot more. There's a good chance I'll archive the project when I'm done since I mainly want to learn.
Am I wasting my time? What does it actually cost to manage a device?
I've had similar frustrations.
It's not so much that tools like Ubuntu Core are only for large companies. But the use cases for which they are designed is complex. The level of complexity is better handled by a team than an individual. I think about it this way, suppose basic competency requires 300 hours of research and experiment. A team of six can readily get up to speed in a month: while you figure out how to manage updates, I can work on the maintenance contract, Bubba can be fiddling around getting devices to talk to each other, and Joan can be working on application logic. Each with just a few hours a week and we're done in a month. 300 hours for a hobbyist is an entirely different proposition. That might wind up being a year with a year's worth of opportunity costs...Ubuntu Core instead of Go-lang (and whatever else looks like the coolest thing this month (twelve months over)).
It took me a long time of feeling incompetent (I'm a hobbyist) to realize: when I think I'm not in the target market, I'm probably right. Kubernetes, Spring Boot, and Hadoop aren't for me. I don't have the scale of problem they solve. I have different scale problems and am better off investigating technologies that work at small scale. For what it's worth, If I was exploring IOT on RPi, I'd just run Raspberrian to get started because IOT business logic doesn't depend on the OS. I can always optimize the OS later if it matters. Over top of Rapsberrian I'd apply Erlang because it scales down to teams of one because it's a programming language not a OS configuration and Erlang was designed to do IOT (before it was called IOT) type activities. YMMV.