"For smaller devices, the Yocto project is popular. While it's good for building custom Linux installations, it has downsides for delivering applications. It's hard to understand, can take hours to compile, and solves only a portion of the problems present in device management."

This hits home. I work at a company that builds sensor systems. We started using Yocto before my time in the company but we lived the above sentence for the last couple years before migrating to Ubuntu. We also happen to be scoping out a configuration management tool for this year. I will definitely be checking out Deviceplane in the coming days.