Skip to main content

Your submission was sent successfully! Close

Thank you for signing up for our newsletter!
In these regular emails you will find the latest updates from Canonical and upcoming events where you can meet our team.Close

Thank you for contacting our team. We will be in touch shortly.Close

  1. Blog
  2. Article

Thibaut Rouffineau
on 31 May 2016

Snaps on NAS: IOT apps for your private network


QNAP selects snaps and Ubuntu to bring IOT apps to its NAS

On Friday QNAP announced that they were adopting snaps as the application format of choice for their NAS going forward. Behind this decision are two factors, the ease of development of snaps and the universality of snaps, especially to create IoT applications.

NAS have been around for a while, and have been used across a wide array of use cases from media servers in tech-savvy household to remote file server by SMBs. QNAP have been a pioneer in this space offering an appstore for their NAS, with hundred of apps: local web servers (WordPress, Drupal), Media server (Kodi), Cloud backup …

The rise of connected homes and buildings means an increasing number of sensors, smart meters,security cameras, plugs being connected to the local network… And therefore to the local NAS. This means NAS are seeing a new lease of life, and can now start to act as local IoT gateways, offering a great combination of local storage and computing power. A range of IoT applications are particularly suited to run on such machines that require local computing for fast decision making and large data storage for auditing or future prediction reasons. Video surveillance applications for example can use local movement detection algorithms to alert of any intrusion, cost effectively store all the video footage locally for audit purposes, back up to the cloud only relevant footage or summaries.

By adopting snaps as the preferred application format for their NAS going forward QNAP is looking to surf on the growing popularity of snaps across Ubuntu desktop and Ubuntu Core in IoT. They’re keen to leverage universality of snaps which can be deployed from Ubuntu desktops to Ubuntu Core IoT Gateways. But also the simplicity of creating snaps, with snapcraft a tool that makes it simple to build secure, contained applications from source easily.

Related posts


Massimiliano Gori
16 September 2024

Announcing Authd: OIDC authentication for Ubuntu Desktop and Server

Ubuntu Article

Today we are announcing the general availability of Authd, a new authentication daemon for Ubuntu that allows direct integration with cloud-based identity providers for both Ubuntu Desktop and Server. Authd is available free of charge on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. At launch, Authd supports Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory) ident ...


Richard Ferreira
4 September 2024

Meet Canonical at Open Source Summit Europe 2024

AI Article

Join Canonical, the publisher of Ubuntu, as we attend the upcoming Open Source Summit Europe 2024 in Austria. Hosted by the Linux Foundation, this summit is the premier event for developers, technologists, and community leaders with a keen interest in the innovation that open source enables. Mark your calendars for September 16-18, 2024, ...


Will French
29 June 2024

Maximizing CPU efficiency and energy savings with IntelⓇ QuickAssist Technology on Ubuntu 24.04

Cloud and server Article

In this post, we show that IntelⓇ QAT can be used in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS to offload compute intensive workloads, maximizing CPU efficiency and driving cost savings. ...