This Friday, November 9th 2018, marks 5 years since we first successfully ran Docker on a Raspberry Pi. This was a huge breakthrough in the world of edge computing. For the first time, we could use containers to run applications on what was, and has become even more so, the most ubiquitous, widely supported and easily accessible IoT device on the market.
This breakthrough was a catalyst for us to build our platform, which has since expanded into a powerful suite of tools designed to reduce the friction faced by fleet owners when deploying edge devices.
Over the last five years we’ve achieved some incredible milestones, which we as a team are very proud of. A small sample includes:
- 2013: Docker running on ARM (Raspberry Pi)
- 2014: Launch of our cloud platform
- 2015: Open source meta-resin (build your own board support)
- 2016: balenaOS 2.0
- 2016: balenaEtcher
- 2017: balenaEngine (Container engine based on Moby technology from Docker)
- 2018: Multicontainer support
- 2018: balenaFin
- 2018: openBalena
- 2019: TBA 🙂
Team balena and Summit 2018
Over the past 5 years, we’ve also grown our team into an incredible group of people dedicated to unlocking the potential of physical computing. The strength of our team is never more apparent than at our annual summit, which this year was held in Barcelona, Spain for the first time.
If you check out our team page on our (brand new!) website, you’ll see that our team is based all around the world and across many different time zones. Some of us are based in the US, some in the UK, some in Greece, some in… well, why not take a look at this handy map showing where we all are and how far we traveled for the summit?
var myLatLng = {lat: obj.lat, lng: obj.long};
new google.maps.Marker({
position: myLatLng,
map: map,
icon: 'https://balena.io/assets/archive/2018/11/balena_icon.png',
title: obj.city + ' ' + obj.distance
});
}
} </script>
As you can see, some of us had to travel a lot farther to Barcelona than others, but we all made it there and back again safely, just that some were more jet-lagged than others. Nevertheless, with everyone in the same geographical location for a week, it was an opportunity to jam-pack a year’s worth of socializing and collaboration with our colleagues down into a single week.
The main focus for the week was renaming the company which is no small task when you’ve been building software for the past 5 years and heavily integrating the company name into everything you do. However, having the whole team in the same room allowed for serious progress to be made very quickly.
We started each day with breakfast at the hotel, followed by a keynote reviewing our progress and outlining our vision for the future. Various teams across the company also had a chance to showcase what they’ve been working on and what they’ll be building next.
Days were filled with work from everyone towards the rename project as well as a huge amount of effort put towards the release of openBalena and development of some of our future projects.
Evenings were comprised with a mix of activities involving dinner at various locations around Barcelona, all with a lot of opportunity to talk about our ideas and projects with the rest of the team. Maybe a little Mario Kart, too.
Forward into 2019 and beyond
Everything we do at balena is dedicated to enabling everyone to realize their visions in IoT and deploy their applications at scale without having to worry about infrastructure slowing them down. We have a lot of exciting projects in the pipeline that take this mission to the next level, which is a story we’ll save for another day. All we can say is the next 5 years will be just as, if not more, exciting as the last.
Enjoy balenafying all the things!
