Integrations

Per-provider notes for the fleet management solutions that have ready-made Rugix integrations.

Nexigon

Nexigon is developed by the creators of Rugix as a commercial complement that funds Rugix’s open-source work. It pairs natively with Rugix Ctrl for device connectivity, remote access, and fleet-wide update orchestration, and ships as SaaS (EU/US), managed dedicated, or air-gapped self-hosted.

To onboard a device, follow the Nexigon quickstart guide for Rugix.

thin-edge.io

thin-edge.io is an open-source, cloud-agnostic IoT framework for resource-constrained devices that abstracts over backends like Cumulocity IoT, Azure IoT, and AWS IoT. It officially supports Rugix: ready-made recipes for Rugix Bakery wire up the thin-edge.io agent and a Rugix Ctrl integration layer, so updates work out of the box. See the thin-edge.io Rugix reference repository.

Memfault

Memfault is a fleet management solution with a focus on observability. We provide a template repository showing how to integrate Rugix with Memfault; the corresponding Interrupt article covers it in depth.

Mender

Mender is a fleet management solution with a tightly-coupled update engine of its own. To integrate Rugix Ctrl with Mender’s fleet management, see our template repository for Rugix with Mender.

Mender is often picked because it positions itself as a one-vendor solution. When weighing it as your on-device update engine specifically (separate from its fleet management), several limitations of the open-source distribution are worth knowing about up front:

• Delta updates are commercial-only. Mender’s Xdelta-based delta updates are reserved for paid tiers; the open-source distribution ships full artifacts on every release. Rugix Ctrl is fully open-source and ships delta updates (both dynamic block-based with content-defined chunking, and static delta compression) for everyone.
• No block-wise integrity verification. Mender verifies the hash over the whole artifact, and the check only completes after the payload has been streamed (and written). Rugix Ctrl verifies every block against a Merkle tree rooted in the bundle header before writing it, so a streaming install never writes data that has not been verified.
• Updates are not verified by default. Mender does not enforce signature verification unless explicitly configured. Rugix Ctrl refuses to install a bundle that has neither a valid signature against a configured root certificate nor an explicit --bundle-hash; see Signed Updates.
• A/B only. Mender’s rootfs update mechanism supports symmetric A/B and nothing else: no recovery / asymmetric schemes and no multi-slot configurations. Rugix Ctrl supports both.
• No tryboot support on Raspberry Pi. Mender’s Pi support is gated on U-Boot and tends to lag newer models. Rugix Ctrl supports tryboot, the Pi Foundation’s official A/B mechanism, and can update the boot partition itself (including config.txt and device tree overlays), which the U-Boot path cannot.
• C++ rather than a memory-safe language. Mender’s client is written in C++. Rugix Ctrl is written in Rust, eliminating entire classes of memory-safety vulnerabilities at the language level for a component that runs as root and parses untrusted binary input.

For the full picture, see our comparison of open-source OTA update engines, which evaluates Mender, RAUC, SWUpdate, OSTree, and Rugix Ctrl side by side.

If you have devices already running Mender’s update client and want to switch to Rugix Ctrl, see Migrating from Mender.