Reducing the friction for IOT application developers by providing drop-in chunks of functionality.

Highlights

• Pre-built containers: Just drop them into your IOT projects
• Provide functionality: Need a containerised browser? Just drop in the browser block!
• Intelligent and opinionated: Blocks discover each other and work together automatically.

Motivation

Blocks are a concept that came out of the labs at balena.

Balena's mission is to reduce friction for fleet owners and unlock the power of physical computing. Blocks contribute to this by removing friction for developers of IOT applications by providing pre-built chunks of functionality. They enable application developers to focus only on the code they need to write, and rely on the blocks to provide everything else.

Usage

You can find the blocks that are available to use on balenaHub. Each one will have an image reference like this:

You can use this image reference in two ways; in your docker-compose.yml file, or in a dockerfile:

Docker-Compose

The image reference is added under services:

version: '2.1'

services:
  browser:
    image: bhcr.io/balenablocks/browser-aarch64

Dockerfile

The image reference is used in the FROM directive:

FROM bhcr.io/balenablocks/browser-aarch64 as base

For more details and advanced scenarios head over to the usage section of the docs.