MRmrbluecoat·Feb 10, 2026
Is it just meant for software or also IoT use cases, like https://github.com/balena-io/open-balena ?
In Show HN: Distr 2.0 – A year of learning how to ship to customer environmentsbalena-io
open-balena
Shell2018–2026
balena-io / open-balena
open-balena
Open source software to manage connected IoT devices at scale
3Distinct people
4Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
1.3KGitHub stars
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What it is
Open source software to manage connected IoT devices at scale
GitHub
Where it is used
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What people are saying
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year4 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2018-12-24 19:14:13 UTC to 2026-02-10 20:21:28 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
4 sourcesHow does this compare to https://github.com/balena-io/open-balena ?
In Show HN: Distr – open-source distribution platform for on-prem deploymentsdisclosure I work for balena as an engineer.
There are many ways to evaluate if a company is trust worthy, that's up to you to judge, but ill provide some background info.
balena is a venture backed company, the team is about 100 people and we have some notable investors and advisors see https://www.balena.io/team
balena's revenue generating product is balenaCloud, which is a sass cloud offering for companies to manage their IoT devices. https://www.balena.io/cloud
If you don't want to use the sass offering we also have an open core version openBalena, anything you can run on balenaCloud you can run on your own machines using openBalena, but you will not have features like the dashboard or VPN. https://github.com/balena-io/open-balena
In What Is BalenaHub?Device fleets are incredibly hard to get right, and if you have no updateability, you have to nail them the first time. For someone coming from a cloud background, it's a jungle out there, where all sorts of "easy" or "solved" problems are nothing of the sort.
As a sort of PSA, I want to plug the work that we have done at balena.io (formerly known as resin.io) to solve problems like these for everyone deploying Linux IoT devices, including open source / non-paying users.
We've built the open source balenaOS[1] and the (newly) open sourced openBalena[2][3] management server that anyone can use without paying us a penny. If you're about to manufacture a fleet of linux devices, and are about to put them out there, and don't want to pay for a service (so you're not using balenaCloud) but also don't want to solve problems we've spent years alr
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eady finetuning, (such as ntp, dns, cellular modem support, read-only filesystem, host updates, etc etc) use the above projects and save yourself a mountain of pain in the ensuing years.
I hate being alarmist, but working with device fleets over the last 7 years, I've seen things you wouldn't believe. I've seen devices catch on fire, drown in storms, launch DDoS attacks, and everything in between. It's incredibly hard to underestimate how bad things can get when you put your devices out there with no ability to find them and update them if push comes to shove.
[1] balenaOS: https://www.balena.io/os/
[2] openBalena: https://www.balena.io/open/
[3] openBalena github: https://github.com/balena-io/open-balena