Lessons Learned Supporting Nearly 200,000 IoT Devices
Talkat Embedded Linux Conference @ Open Source Summit North America 2022 · on Wednesday, 2022-06-22· at 13:45· Room 201/202 (Level 2), JW Marriott Austin, 110 E 2nd Street Austin, TX 78701·
summary
Company runs nearly 200,000 devices using balenaOS (Yocto-based) with balenaEngine and a supervisor agent to push updates and run containers, plus balenaCloud/openBalena for fleet control and Etcher for flashing. They build a balenaFin board with eMMC instead of SD after SD failures, and use deltas that shrink update transfers 10–70× to handle satellite and very low‑bandwidth cellular links. Lessons: treat devices as pets, enable remote diagnostics, pre-schedule staged OS+app updates, and expect heterogeneous hardware from chip shortages.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (20)
- 0:00Intro
- 2:14What is Balena
- 3:30Balena products
- 7:16How Balena works
- 9:13Device Management
- 11:43Two Options
- 12:18Deploy with Balena
- 12:58Lessons learned
- 16:51Hardware
- 17:06Constraints
- 19:52Physical Access
- 22:13Memory
- 24:48Connectivity
- 28:19Backup connectivity
- 30:29Remote access
- 31:24Running diagnostics
- 32:26Remote updates
- 35:25Test environments
- 36:31Preschedule fleet updates
- 37:30Conclusion
related talks
34mBuilding an IoT-class Device
47mLessons and Advances in IoT: Toward 1M Connected Devices
39mLessons we’ve learned after starting to work exclusively on IoT projects
13mARM mbed
42mBoF: The Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded
55mIoT Solution Recipes - Beyond your first slice of Raspberry Pi
36mContinuous Deployment of IoT Sensors
55mBoF: Embedded Update Tools