Skip to content

Migrate Off Of Balena

Closed Aug 27, 2019 100% complete

Migrate off of balena in favor of building a system that is fully updateable without an Internet connection.

The operating system of the robot currently relies on balena. In this use case, we provide a Dockerfile in our repo; when we want to deploy, we add a URL provided by balena as a git remote, and when we push to it, balena builds the docker image and…

Migrate off of balena in favor of building a system that is fully updateable without an Internet connection.

The operating system of the robot currently relies on balena. In this use case, we provide a Dockerfile in our repo; when we want to deploy, we add a URL provided by balena as a git remote, and when we push to it, balena builds the docker image and deploys to all the machines connected on the network.

However, many opentrons robots are not connected to the internet; and we do not have an expectation that they will be. As a workaround, we currently ship updates of only the python wheel containing the opentrons server, which builds in configuration files and many system scripts that are deployed to various directories to customize system behavior (after 3.3 and #1114 anyway). However, some things cannot be updated without updating the container, and container rollouts present significant issues. In addition, our use of an old version of the Balena runtime - which cannot be updated on non-internet-connected machines - presents certain robot crashes that in some cases cannot be fixed.

To avoid these customer-facing issues; to unify our update path; and to regain the ability to update the full system, we will transition from use of balena to a system that is built with build-root and that fully updates the entire robot with no internet connection required.

This milestone is complete when that system is complete, built, and can be deployed to machines in the wild.

This milestone is closed.

No open issues remain. View closed issues or see open milestones in this repository.