Is there a self-hosted version of Balena?

Product support
1

Hi all,

Colleagues at a startup I’m working with have asked me if there is a self-hosted commercial build of Balena.io available?

Thanks!

Alex

8

Are you looking for Balena Cloud ?

9

I am looking for a Balena product like Balena Cloud but that we can run on our own servers.

Colleagues are asking me about this as there is a feeling that we want to use the commercial Balena product but hosted on our own hardware for security purposes.

11

Then you should look for openBalena.
I am pretty new and I am also evaluating it.

It offers nearly the same characteristics of Balena Cloud.
The aspects which seems missing are:

  • web UI
  • Tags
  • SSH access using offered VPN (should be supported but its still a beta feature and I was unable to work correctly with it)

But I was able to deploy easily a complex multicontainer application on embedded devices without nearly any efforts.
Just follow the getting started guide

12

Thanks @KingRial - will take a look

17

Hi Alex,

What you are actually referring to is Balena On Prem, which includes all of the features and functionality of Balena but hosted on your infrastructure. It’s available as both a physical on-premise installation ( running on an Intel NUC for example), or a dedicated instance which we would manage for you.

OpenBalena is just the device OS itself, it does not include the dashboard UI, builders or container registries etc.

If you drop me an email at joeh@balena.io, I would be happy to discuss the above in more detail with you.

22

Hi Alex, just to add a bit more info to my previous post on OpenBalena. Essentially with Open Balena you are able to configure, manage and deploy software running on your devices, but instead of using all the tools that you are familiar with now, such as the Balena cloud dashboard, it is instead managed through the CLI. openBalena is also hosted on your own infrastructure, and as a result certain functionality such as performing updates with binary container deltas will not be possible. It is also the users responsibility to maintain security, scaling, and reliability of all the backend services that you provide to support your device fleet.

That’s not to say you could not build a similar UI on top using the SDKs, but it all comes down to the level of functionality desired. Another point worth mentioning is there is no dedicated support with OpenBalena, apart from best-effort support on our forums.