Add support for scheduled releases (maintenance window)

Feature Requests
1

Hi Balena team,

After trying out Balena for some time, I upgraded to the paid plan yesterday. One feature that is either: a) not available b) not documented enough (in my opinion) is support for scheduled releases.

In my use case, my devices are being used throughout the day. I don’t want to update them while they are in use. What I’d like to do is push a new release to Balena and schedule a roll out at a specified time & date. To me this seems pretty trivial and I expected this to be possible, but I couldn’t find any information about it. I know I could build similar functionality myself, but for small teams (1 developer in my case) this is not ideal.

Would love to hear your thoughts :slight_smile:

2

Hi @Gebaksteen, welcome to our forums!

We do have such a feature on our roadmap which we call Maintenance Windows, and will probably be a new type of release policy [1]. Unfortunately I can’t share any specific dates yet.

As a workaround you can use the update locking mechanism [2] to achieve this by writing a script that will create and remove the lock on schedule.

We will keep this thread updated when we have progress to share.

[1] Release policy | balena
[2] Update locks | balena

4

Thanks for the quick reply and great that such a feature is being worked on! Looking forward to using it once it’s released. I will take a look at the workaround info you provided