openBalena offers balenaCloud core features such as “the powerful API, the built-in device VPN, as well as our spectacular provisioning workflow
Resin.io, a leading software company using of Linux containers and other modern cloud technologies, changed its name to balena and released an open source version of its IoT fleet management platform for Linux devices called openBalena. Intel NUC, Jetson TX2, Raspberry Pi, and a new RPi CM3 carrier called the balenaFin are the main targets.
While balenaOS is an open source spinoff of the container-based device software that works with balenaCloud, the new openbalena is an open version of the balenaCloud server software. Customers can now choose between letting balena manage their fleet of devices or building their own openBalena based server platform that manages fleets of devices running balenaOS.
openBalena’s CLI lets you provision and configure devices, push updates, check status, and view logs. Its backend services can securely store device information, allow remote management via a built-in VPN service, and distribute container images to devices.
The Balena family
openBalena is an open source version of the Resin.io server/cloud platform for managing fleets of Linux-based IoT devices, which is now known as balenaCloud. The open source ResinOS distro is now called balenaOS. Resin.io’s Etcher software for fast image writes to flash drives is now called balenaEtcher and the Project Fin carrier board for the Raspberry Pi Compute Module is now called balenaFin.
openBalena is a reduced feature version of the commercial product. However, the components shared by both commercial and open versions are closely aligned, which “will allow us to release updates for the project as we update our cloud product, while also allowing open source contributions to flow back into the cloud product,” writes Marinos. The new deployment workflows and tools to accomplish this coordination will be announced soon.
openBalena offers balenaCloud core features such as “the powerful API, the built-in device VPN, as well as our spectacular provisioning workflow,” writes Marinos. It can also similarly scale to large fleets of devices. However, openBalena is single-user rather than supporting multiple users. It’s controlled solely via the already open sourced balena CLI tool rather than balenaCloud’s web-based dashboard, and it lacks “updates with binary container deltas.”
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