Resin.io changes name to balena, releases open-source edition | Hacker News Reader

Resin.io changes name to balena, releases open-source edition

balena.io

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Resin (now Balena Cloud) is good but relatively bare bones at the moment. Issues we ran into:

- PagerDuty integration of device up/down (had to build our own similar to [1])

- Pinning specific devices to not latest version (not possible)

- Pinning specific devices to branch (not possible)

- Incremental / gradual / staged deployments (supposedly API has support for this but missing from standard tooling)

- Semantic versioning of releases (not possible, it only accepts and shows git SHA256)

- SSH access is technically possible (we reverse engineered their CLI tool which connects to their SSH reverse proxy) but it would be nicer if the resin ssh command provided a way to run remote commands non-interactively (e.g. to scrape load average, etc.).

- No prebuilt instrumentation like load average, memory usage, etc.

[1] https://github.com/hobochild/resin-pager

We use balena for a lot of our edge deployments and it works great. For some of your points it is possible, just have to dig into the API a bit -- the docs can be a bit outdated and hard to find though.

For pinning specific devices or incremental (canary) deployments we built a tool using their api that might be helpful for your case [1] although now I suppose a rename is in order :)

[1] https://github.com/mobilityhouse/resin-release-tool

Solid points, have you shared with the team?

Will do, this project has started using resin\b\b balena a lot in the past few months so I will definitely reach out to the Balena team.

Pinning devices to a release is possible. See this repo[0] for the API calls (also covers staged rollouts). We're using these APIs for production deployments.

[0] https://github.com/balena-io-projects/staged-releases

I really can't understand this rebranding at all. "Resin" is infinitely catchier and easier to pronounce. I can think of like 3 or 4 ways to pronounce their new name, and it just doesn't make sense. It's a nonsensical nonexistent "word".

It's cause of copyright, did you even read it m8?

It means “whale” in Spanish

I would say it is inspired in the Spanish word for "whale" (ballena).

I love the new name and appreciate the open sourcing! I'm a big fan of the entire ecosystem of products. Congratulations!

Etcher might be the single greatest flash2disk tool out there. I'm 100% in love with it. Whatever name you guys go with, I'm behind it.

Sweet! I love using resin (balena) for my raspberry pi projects.

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