Oh totally. I actually thought about exactly that. I'm basically thinking "this -will- fail at some point, so when it does, I want to be able to replace a failed unit very rapidly."

I'm tinkering with an auto-provisioning function that tells a given ESP what node type it's connected to and configures itself from there.

> but hardly reliable on the scale of years.

I’ve had similar experiences with “enterprise”-grade hardware.

But sometimes the “price” isn’t just the hardware, but also having someone on-call 24/7 to support and possibly fly-out to investigate within X hours.