What sorts of devices would benefit from a system like this? Can someone give me sone use cases where being able to run containers on embedded devices would be useful? The tech seems pretty cool, but I am just having a hard time wrapping my head around it as someone who's experience with embedded stops at hacking on raspi/arduino/esp* devices
We built balena after running docker for millions of hours on resinOS devices. Turns out, containers are not just a good, but probably the best way to manage software on embedded linux devices. The whole "edge computing" wave that's started moving now is based on the idea of deploying containerised workloads to these devices. What we found though, is that Docker tends to have several subtle biases towards cloud usage that become apparent in the embedded context. So we made Balena to embed our improvements into Docker.
I can talk about this stuff for hours, but suffice to say we have customers doing building automation, smart retail, digital signage, industrial automation, automotive, etc. My current favourite though is the guys that put devices on the back of sea turtles in the galapagos. Check this footage out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfkfLsgEN9Q
Edited to add: On the hardware question, resinOS works on many many device types including niche industrial boards and well-known maker SBCs. We've made it relatively easy to port to new devices so we can keep expanding our supported types of devices. In the meantime, we're working on our own "industrial" raspberry pi variant, which, based on our experience so far, should be good enough for 60-80% of serious use cases. https://resin.io/blog/introducing-project-fin-a-board-for-fl...
Source: have photographed fish with resin/docker.
Btw, also a big fan of Etcher!