
A Moby-based container engine for IoT - alex_hirner
https://www.balena.io
======
zapita
This looks like a great project. I have a few questions in case the
maintainers read this.

\- Do you plan to stay up-to-date with new Moby releases, or is it a one-time
hard fork?

\- Do you plan on contributing some of the IoT optimizations back into
mainline Moby over time?

\- If you have contributed to Moby in the past, what's your experience of
contributing, is the community welcoming?

\- What's the planned differenciation between Balena and Resin.io?

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imrehg
For some extra context (differences, features, comparison), here are the
slides introducing Balena at the Moby Summit last year:

[https://www.slideshare.net/resin_io/balena-a-mobybased-
conta...](https://www.slideshare.net/resin_io/balena-a-mobybased-container-
engine-for-iot)

(too bad that the talk wasn't recorded by the organizers, as far as I know)

------
tekromancr
but why, tho?

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

~~~
alexandros
hey there -- resin.io founder here.

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](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...](https://resin.io/blog/introducing-project-fin-a-board-for-fleet-
owners/)

~~~
pletnes
Can confirm, resin.io is brilliant. The new multicontainer functionality looks
like a great improvement!

Source: have photographed fish with resin/docker.

------
orf
Looks like a great project! What is stopping Docker from using binary diffing
in general? It seems it would be a big win for them, I imagine their AWS
bandwidth bill is absolutely gigantic.

------
erikb
curl www.foo.bar | sh

Yeah, right.

~~~
asadlionpk
why not though? how is 'git clone a huge repo and run an obfuscated makefile'
safer?

~~~
geofft
I do genuinely wonder if all the folks on the "let's make fun of curl | sh"
train also steadfastly refuse to run ./configure on tarballs from SourceForge,
and instead spend the time to audit every custom M4 macro in the project along
with every Makefile.am (lest either of them shell out to something untoward)
and run autoreconf themselves.

~~~
lstamour
Why stop there? Most projects probably don't sign every commit, and even if
they do, you'd still want to code review just to make sure mistakes or planted
routines didn't make it in. I'm assuming, of course, that any code you
compile, you'd eventually want to /run/ somewhere. And if you're going to
sandbox it or use permissions to restrict it, well, you could always do the
same with the curl command. ;-)

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60654
Hmm, Moby is quite avant-garde, or at least was back in the day... But why
would anyone want to build IoT products on top of an aging DJ?

(... I'll show myself out.)

