This article ties together research from Brooks, Ringelmann, Dunbar, Cowan, and a Harvard meta-analysis of 142 empirical studies to explain why. The "10-slot budget" is deliberately approximate - a reasoning tool, not a law of physics. The value is in mapping your own team's count and seeing what falls out.
Author here. Spent a decade deploying IIoT: sensors, gateways, fleet management across industrial sites. These are the patterns that consistently separate systems still running from ones that got scrapped. Happy to answer questions.
API Gateway is great for unified security, rate-limiting, audit, etc. Those are real technical wins.
But "reduces coordination overhead"? No. You've just moved the coordination to the Gateway team. Patterns don't fix org problems — if your teams are siloed, adding a central gatekeeper just creates a new bottleneck.
RISC-V is speedrunning ARM's history. ARM spent decades going from embedded to phones to servers. RISC-V is doing the same arc in fast-forward.
High-performance boards like this matter even if you'll never buy one. Server adoption drives toolchain investment, which drives chip volume, which eventually drops prices on the $2 MCUs the rest of us actually need for IoT projects.
The manufacturing paranoia is justified. I've seen IIoT setups where the contract manufacturer had full firmware access during flashing. TPM or not, if your CM has the keys at production time, you've just moved the trust boundary.
What actually works: generate device credentials on-device after it leaves the factory, not during. Process design matters more than chip selection.
Pi 5 pricing gets harder to justify when you add up the extras. 8GB board + active cooler + good SD card + case + power supply = $150+ easily.
Used 1L mini PCs (EliteDesk, ThinkCentre Tiny, etc.) with i5-8400T/8GB/256GB go for $50-100 on eBay. You get x86 compatibility, NVMe support, real Ethernet, and no thermal throttling.
Running an EliteDesk 800 G4 with 2.5GbE adapter and 2x2TB NVMe for home server duties. Draws ~15W idle, handles everything I threw at it. The Pi would need USB adapters for any of that.
Pi still wins for GPIO projects and actual embedded use. But for "small Linux box" use cases, the used business mini PC market is tough to beat.