Integrating Balena Cloud compatibility on Embedded Controller

Project help
1

Hi All!

As this is my first post, let me introduce myself;
I’m a long time fan of the Balena-Engine for OCI containers and I’m just looking in to Balena Cloud. I work for a manufacturer of Embedded controllers and I would love to integrate Balena Cloud capabilities into our controllers.

After some hours of research I could not find a resources that describes the installation of Balena-Cloud on the PLCnext target. I found plenty of ways to work with Balena OS. But I would rather just “install” “Balena-Cloud” capabilities. Think about running a shell script to set everything up.

I found installation methods for Balena-CLI but i guess, there would be a lot more to it? What about the supervisor agent?

Is there any project going on to create “a Linux installation” or would their be any chance of pulling this off?

With Kind regards

Dries

3

Hi @driesvl, let me clear things up a bit because I think you might be slightly off here.

  • balenaCloud is our cloud platform to manage a fleet of devices, this includes provisioning, typical admin stuff like reboot or ssh into it, and deploy code. We have an open source alternative to balenaCloud if you want to self host it which is openBalena.
  • balenaOS is our yocto linux based OS, it’s what runs on the device and connects to balenaCloud. This includes balenaEngine, the supervisor and a lot more goodies.
  • balenaCli is just a CLI tool that facilitates the operations you might want to do with your fleet (deploy code, manage devices, etc). Typically you run this tool on your development machine and not on your device as it’s not really needed there.

I’m not sure what you mean with “installing balenaCloud capabilities” on your controllers? What capabilities are you looking for? I’m not familiar with PLCnext but if you have a new device type you’ll need to build balenaOS for it. There are two alternatives, you can do it yourself if you are proficient with Yocto (see this guide), or you can get a quote from us to see if it would work for you. Once your device is running balenaOS it will connect to balenaCloud (or openBalena) and you’ll have access to the entire capabilities that we offer.

Let me know if this helps, happy to help you out.

5

Hey tmigone

Thanks for your prompt reply!

Maybe I expressed myself a bit wrong in my previous post. What we want to do is manage our device with the Balena Cloud but without installing or creating an BalenaOS image on the device. We would like to keep our own also Yocto OS and just install the components of Balena OS so we can manage our devices with Balena Cloud. We need our own OS for a lot of functionalities on the controller.

Would you also be able to provide a quote for this installation method?

Kind regards

Dries

6

Hi Dries, this is not a workflow that we support out of the box. We typically require customers to install balenaOS on their device in order to benefit from the fleet management capabilities of balenaCloud, which includes a lot of features for updating and managing the OS as well. It would be helpful to better understand what capabilities you need with your own OS that are not offered as part of balenaOS, or could not easily be added to balenaOS, or could not be added in application containers instead of in the OS.

That said, we are exploring some options that may allow users to run their own OS but still use balenaCloud, but this is still early days. Your feedback would be helpful as we consider this feature.

Would it be okay if a member of our Customer success team reaches out to you to discuss your particular use case?

Thanks!
Alison

8

Hi Alison

Yes, please reach out.
You can use the email which i used to create my account.

Dries

10

We will be in touch with you soon.