Canonical Ltd. is making the container-centric edition of its popular Ubuntu Linux distribution available for connected devices in a major expansion of its existing mobile efforts into the Internet of Things.

Ubuntu Core made its original debut almost four years ago with the explicit goal of providing an alternative to MontaVista and VxWorks from Intel subsidiary Wind River, which are the two dominant embedded operating systems on the market. While Core hasn’t gained much ground against its biggest rivals, Canonical refreshed it in December with a repurposed version for cloud environments.

The biggest change in the new iteration is a container-based updating mechanism called Snappy that draws on the lessons the company learned from its work on Ubuntu Phone. The framework handles changes to applications and the kernel similarly to how relational databases execute transactions, guaranteeing that an operation either completes as intended or aborts with no impact on the system.

That’s part of a broader emphasis on reliability in this new release that also includes built-in controls that ensure that a service can only access the data and features it requires, which removes another major concern for users. The entire package comes in at 110 megabytes, making it small enough to fit on most connected devices capable of running competing platforms.

That combination of reliability and density also lends itself well to containerized applications in the cloud, which are often distributed across a large number of compact instances that are too numerous to administer manually for issues such as a failed updates.

More importantly, containers are interoperable across different types of hardware, a feature that Canonical hopes to exploit in order to turn the tides against its embedded-system competitors. A software engineer building an application for a connected device running Ubuntu Core could theoretically leverage that portability to spin up a development environment identical to their target system and seamlessly push out the finished code once they’re done using Snappy.

That flexibility also extends to rolling out updates, which are implemented without burdening the user or rendering an end-point unusable. That’s handy in the emerging use scenarios that Canonical is targeting with its platform, such as patching a fleet of delivery drones or refreshing thousands of infrastructure sensors scattered across oil rigs located hundreds of miles offshore.

The built-in app store included in the embedded edition also makes the operating system attractive for devices where the user plays a more active part, providing a single, secure destination for downloads not unlike the store available on the desktop version. Canonical boasts that several early adopters are already finding success with the software, including the Open Source Robotis Foundation and Ninja Blocks, the buzzed-about smart home startup.