I asked the team, and the SSH support is in ongoing development.
Environment variables are supported, can you explain a bit more what you find lacking there? Is it as discussed in this other thread Error trying to set environment variable with balena-cli - #6 by dfunckt ?
Also, if you run into any issues, feel free to also open an issue at GitHub - balena-io/open-balena: Open source software to manage connected IoT devices at scale As mentioned in that page as well,
OpenBalena is currently in beta. While fully functional, it lacks features we consider important before we can comfortably call it production-ready. During this phase, don’t be alarmed if things don’t work as expected just yet (and please let us know about any bugs or errors you encounter!)
Thus at this stage some use cases might be more difficult than expected, and the information might be more scattered than it should. We are looking at pulling information together better. And thanks a lot for your feedback, it’s very helpful!