balena cycle roundup – April 2025

Balena uses the Intentional Work Framework where we pitch our ideas to the team in the form of “bets” and try to select the ones that will be most impactful to execute for the upcoming cycle.

Here’s the round-up of what our team has been up to: 

Balena Summit 2025

This cycle ended a few weeks later than usual because our global team met in Gran Canaria for our yearly summit. The week-long conference was jam-packed with keynotes, brainstorms, and break out sessions. Our team used this as a great opportunity to meet, dine, and interact with team members in person. You can read more about our yearly summits and the rationale behind them in 2024’s Summit Recap.

API key expiration date requirement

To enhance the security of our platform and align with secure-by-default principles, all newly created API keys on balenaCloud will now require an expiration date. This ensures keys automatically become invalid after a defined period unless renewed or replaced. Guided by the OWASP Secrets Management Cheat Sheet which recommends secrets expire by default, we’re aligning our practices with best-in-class standards to better protect our users.

Improved documentation for NVIDIA Jetson Orin devices

To help streamline the provisioning process for Jetson Orin devices, we made improvements to the documentation. These include:

• Adding device photos to aid in identifying a particular device model
• Adding a dropdown to select a specific Orin device
• Screenshots to help clarify device messages

BalenaOS support for Jetpack 6.2 and SUPER modes

balenaOS v6.4.0 for Jetson Orin devices now brings support for Jetpack 6.2 and Jetson Linux 36.4.3. This release also enables the new high performance SUPER mode on key device types. Learn more in our recent blog post.

Changes to member additions to organizations and fleets

As part of our ongoing effort to continuously improve the security of our platform, we removed the ability to automatically invite users via their username without their consent. Organization administrators are no longer able to add a user to an organization or fleet by username. The invite will need to be made using the user’s email address. The invitee will need to accept the invitation before they are added to an organization or fleet. This update will allow us to add more information to the dashboard for organization owners such as the 2FA status of org members in a future update.

Allow specifying a start date when retrieving logs

In order to offer more flexibility when fetching logs, you can now add a start parameter to the device logs read API endpoint. (e.g. GET /device/v2/$uuid/logs?start=$start ) The start date can either be an ISO date or a timestamp in milliseconds. Only logs that are greater than or equal to this time will be returned.

Secure boot and full disk encryption for NXP devices

We are currently offering this feature in beta testing for the IOT Gate i.MX8 and IOT Gate i.IMX8 Plus. Get in touch with us if you would like to participate in this testing phase.

Full Raspberry Pi 5 Support in balenaOS

All of the variants (and there are many) of the Raspberry Pi 5 are now supported on balenaOS. Check out our recent blog post to learn about all of the exciting edge IoT options available with this device.

Sorting on user selected tag columns

In order to improve the performance of the device list in the balenaCloud dashboard, we released an update that paginates the list on the server rather than locally in the browser. Unfortunately, this temporarily removed some features such as sorting based on tag columns. We’re happy to announce that sorting by tag columns has now been restored as of UI version 29.1.39!

Improvements to help us ship faster!

• A Github App to rebase PRs: Basejump is a GitHub app that automates the rebasing of pull requests on-demand. This app addresses one of the most common complaints we see around PR approvals: someone has already approved a PR but requires a third team member to re-approve as a non-contributor.
• Migrating the entire balenaOS CI/CD to GitHub Actions: For details about our CI/CD migration journey from Jenkins to GitHub Actions and its benefits for our users, check out our recent blog post. 

Recent blog posts

In case you missed them, check out:

• BalenaOS on VMware in 2025 – Learn about some of the use cases for running the edge-optimized balenaOS in a virtual machine as well as a step-by-step tutorial to get a balena VM up and running. 

• All About Logging on balenaOS – Your device’s logs can provide a wealth of information to help you diagnose issues, view the status of your running services and much more. But what if you need more than the basic logging provided in balenaCloud?

• Containers Can Do Anything: balena-fying Steam – Read how Steam can be successfully containerized and run on balenaOS. Even a complex Linux application using GPU, audio and local storage, can be deployed in Docker containers on edge devices using balena.

• Top 5 Docker containers used in large scale edge AI deployments – We analyzed hundreds of thousands of Docker containers running across nearly a million edge devices to identify the top technologies used in Edge AI deployments. Learn here what are the most popular Docker containers for EdgeAI.

• Docker Containers for Edge AI: Should You Use Pre-Built or Custom Images on NVIDIA Jetson Devices? – When deploying Edge AI applications, you must choose between using pre-built Docker images for convenience or building custom images for greater control, performance and security. What do you usually do?

Interesting bug fixes

• Fix for a sorting issue: We were alerted to an issue where the device list in the balenaCloud dashboard would hide rows with empty values when sorted. This has now been corrected!

That’s a wrap on our most recent development cycle! We look forward to sharing details about our next cycle in the coming weeks.

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