Only just stumbled across Balena from another write-up of a Raspberry Pi tutorial / example use case which used Balena. It was very intriguing.
As a newbie, I haven’t found any good articles or videos of the difference between them, pro’s, con’s, etc… Any info or pointers to articles people know of?
My take is that BalenaEngine is an equivalent to standalone Docker Engine? And it looks somewhat optimised for the ARM and low-power of the RPi. If running from a single RPi? But by configuring it through BalenaCloud, it becomes much easier to scale it out to more than 1 RPi or running multiple RPi’s in a K8S cluster or Docker Swarm?
Initial use case will be to run a small number of containers to help my home network, managing media libraries, Calibre, simple Node.JS, PHP or other web apps instances, plus some others taken from my existing x86 platform. Performance, and success of this PoC would scale to multiple RPi’s as needed…
Any and all help is appreciated.
Hi @tempelec and welcome to the balena forums.
The balena Engine is a moby compatible container engine (“Docker”) - with some optimizations regarding memory usage, less writes to the harddrive / sd card to prolong media life, Delta Updates to Images etc. The biggest drawback are the removal of the plugin interface - and hence Docker Swarm and K8s compability. So it is not meant to spawn a cluster of Swarm or K8s RPis. However, you can use tools like docker-compose to spawn multi-container apps or - even better - use balenaCloud or the local hosted openBalena to orchestrate multiple systems. balena usecase is meant to use it as a means for updating and controlling Single Board Computers in the field, e.g. as part of a product.
You can find out more about the balenaEngine here: balenaEngine - A container engine purpose-built for IoT devices - and about all other products like balenaOS via the “more products” tab at the start of the page.
Cheers
Nico
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Thanks Nico, great answer, and @tempelec let us know how make out with your project!
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