This support thread covers our use case - Devices Cohort Pinned to Automatically Track Release Tag
Ultimately, we want to pin differing releases to differing groups of devices.
We don’t want to overload ‘fleets’, these devices may be part of the same grouping, running the same application. However, we don’t want to release to all devices in a single big bang, we want to be able to release in a staggered fashion to this fleet. An Alpha, Beta, etc. approach to help reduce the risk of releases. Ideally it would be nice to have canary type releases with progressive roll forward and automatic roll back, but any form of release grouping would be nice.
We accomplish this right now with a lot of orchestration on top of Balena that uses the Balena API. Effectively constantly hitting the API with complex queries to identify the devices grouped by tags, and the corresponding release for that tag - sync’ing the two together via individual device release pinning.
This takes knowledge of this completely out of Balena, and it also makes it hard for us to keep things in sync as expected.