Grouped Device Deployments

[joepavitt]

Description

First requested here: #1323

Capturing this in an Epic for planning purposes and to discuss high-level complexities and possible solutions/approaches on how best to tackle it.

Customer Problem:

A single instance of Node-RED can contain multiple tabs, and flows. These flows may communicate with each other, but equally, they can be completely standalone.

Currently, we enable the capturing of a Snapshot of the full instance, that can then be deployed out to remote devices via the FlowForge Device Agent. Any instances with multiple tabs are fully captured in a snapshot, so all tabs are deployed to a Device.

Also, it is currently only possible to set a single "Target Snapshot" for devices attached to a project, so all devices will run that single snapshot.

Requirements

• It has been requested that we enable "tagging" of a device, so that it is possible to deploy a particular tab to a set of devices.
• In addition to the tagging, we are also looking at the ability to group/tag devices for the purposes of Staged Deployments (see Staged Deployments #1492).

Proposal

Work here breaks into two parts:

1. Grouping of devices within a single Project to control which target snapshot is deployed to which device. (see Staged Deployments #1492 where we define that some devices belong to different "stages" of deployment)
2. The ability to snapshot/deploy just a single tab of a Project, rather than the full flow.json - Raised as a separate epic: Tab-level Snapshots #1694

Tasks

Beta Give feedback

1. Device Groups #2340
   needs-triage size:XXL - 13 story +3
2. Device Tagging #2655
   5 of 5
   epic headline needs-triage size:XL - 8 +4
   

[knolleary]

Want to be a little careful here as I think there are two different epics here:

• Grouping Devices
• Tab-level Snapshots

They both feed into a bigger picture but there's no inherent cross-dependency between them as concepts. I'm wary of lumping them together, so I'm going to pull 'Tab-level Snapshots' out as its own Epic (done #1694)

[MarianRaphael]

See also: FlowFuse/device-agent#79