OpenBalena is a platform to deploy and manage connected devices. Devices run balenaOS, a host operating system designed for running containers on IoT devices, and are managed via the balena CLI, which you can use to configure your application containers, push updates, check status, view logs, and so forth. OpenBalena’s backend services, composed of battle-tested components that we’ve run in production on balenaCloud for years, can store device information securely and reliably, allow remote management via a built-in VPN service, and efficiently distribute container images to your devices.

To learn more about openBalena, visit balena.io/open.

• Features
• Getting Started
• Compatibility
• Documentation
• Getting Help
• Contributing
• Roadmap
• Differences between openBalena and balenaCloud
• License
• FAQ
  • How do you ensure continuity of openBalena? Are there security patches on openBalena?
  • How do you ensure the "Join" command actually works between openBalena and
  • Is it "production ready"?
  • Can a new device type be added to openBalena?
  • Are there open-source UI dashboards from the community for openBalena?

Features

• Simple provisioning: Adding devices to your fleet is a breeze
• Easy updates: Remotely update the software on your devices with a single command
• Container-based: Benefit from the power of virtualization, optimized for the edge
• Scalable: Deploy and manage one device, or one million
• Powerful API & SDK: Extend openBalena to fit your needs
• Built-in VPN: Access your devices regardless of their network environment

Getting Started

Our Getting Started guide is the most direct path to getting an openBalena installation up and running and successfully deploying your application to your device(s).

Compatibility

The current release of openBalena has the following minimum version requirements:

• balenaOS v5.2.8
• balena CLI v18.2.2

If you are updating from previous openBalena versions, ensure you update the balena CLI and re-provision any devices to at least the minimum required versions in order for them to be fully compatible with this release, as some features may not work.

While in-place openBalena upgrades may succeed, when performing major updates, it is recommended for a new instance to be deployed in parallel with the existing one, followed by copying state across and pointing a test device to the new instance.

Documentation

While we're still working on the project documentation, please refer to the balenaCloud documentation. BalenaCloud is built on top of openBalena, so the core concepts and functionality is identical. The following sections are of particular interest:

• Overview / A balena primer
• Overview / Core Concepts
• Overview / Going to production
• Develop / Define a container
• Develop / Multiple containers
• Develop / Runtime
• Develop / Interact with hardware
• Deploy / Optimize your builds
• Reference
• FAQ

Getting Help

You are welcome to submit any questions, participate in discussions and request help with any issue in openBalena forums. The balena team frequents these forums and will be happy to help. You can also ask other community members for help, or contribute by answering questions posted by fellow openBalena users. Please do not use the issue tracker for support-related questions.

Contributing

Everyone is welcome to contribute to openBalena. There are many different ways to get involved apart from submitting pull requests, including helping other users on the forums, reporting or triaging issues, reviewing and discussing pull requests, or just spreading the word.

All of openBalena is hosted on GitHub. Apart from its constituent components, which are the API, VPN, Registry, S3 storage service, and Database, contributions are also welcome to its client-side software such as the balena CLI, the balena SDK, balenaOS and balenaEngine.

Roadmap

OpenBalena is currently in beta. While fully functional, it lacks features we consider important before we can comfortably call it production-ready. During this phase, don’t be alarmed if things don’t work as expected just yet (and please let us know about any bugs or errors you encounter!). The following improvements and new functionality is planned:

• Full documentation
• Full test suite
• Simplified deployment
• Remote host OS updates
• Support for custom device types

Differences between openBalena and balenaCloud

Whilst openBalena and balenaCloud share the same core technology, there are some key differences. First, openBalena is self-hosted, whereas balenaCloud is hosted by balena and therefore handles security, maintenance, scaling, and reliability of all the backend services. OpenBalena is also single user, whereas balenaCloud supports multiple users and organizations. OpenBalena also lacks some of the commercial features that define balenaCloud, such as the web-based dashboard and updates with binary container deltas.

The following table contains the main differences between both:

openBalena	balenaCloud
Device updates using full Docker images	Device updates using delta images
Support for a single user	Support for multiple users
Self-hosted deployment and scaling	balena-managed scaling and deployment
Community support via forums	Private support on paid plans
Build locally and deploy via balena-cli	Build remotely with native builders using balena push or git push
No public device URL support	Serve websites directly from device with public device URLs
Management via balena-cli only	Cloud-based device management dashboard
Download images from balena.io and configure locally via balena-cli	Download configured images directly from the dashboard
No remote device diagnostics	Remote device diagnostics

Additionally, refer back to the roadmap above for planned but not yet implemented features.

License

OpenBalena is licensed under the terms of AGPL v3. See LICENSE for details.

FAQ

How do you ensure continuity of openBalena? Are there security patches on openBalena?

openBalena is an open source initiative which is mostly driven by us, but it also gets contributions from the community. We work to keep openBalena as up to date as our bandwidth allows, especially with security patches. That said, we do not have a policy or guarantee of a software release schedule. However, it is in our best interest to keep openBalena updated and patched since we also use it for balenaCloud.

How do you ensure the "Join" command actually works between openBalena and

balenaCloud? The balena join .. command is frequently used for moving devices between openBalena, and balenaCloud environments. This command extends balena os configure .., which is the basic tool balena uses for configuring devices.

Is it "production ready"?

While we actually have some rather large fleets using openBalena, we consider it to be perpetually in "beta". This means potentially introducing breaking changes between releases.

Can a new device type be added to openBalena?

openBalena imports the following public device-types "out of the box". You can specify your own contracts repository by overriding CONTRACTS_PUBLIC_REPO_NAME, CONTRACTS_PUBLIC_REPO_OWNER and IMAGE_STORAGE_BUCKET environment variables on the API service/container.

Are there open-source UI dashboards from the community for openBalena?

Yes! Here are a few:

• open-balena-admin / open-balena-ui by dcaputo-harmoni who first posted about here in our Forums :)
• open-balena-dashboard by Razikus