Imagine this: technology has enabled you to set up more than 100 smart garbage bins across London in the runup to the 2012 Summer Olympics. These bins greet tourists and locals with up-to-date weather forecasts and the sporting events of the day. But because the small computers inside the bins inevitably fail, you fi nd yourself going to each one of them to manually update the so� ware.

That was the eureka moment for Alexandros Marinos, Pagan Gazzard and Petros Angelatos, who were consulting on the garbage bin project and would later co-found resin.io (now balena) as a result of this real-world problem. “We have a picture of one of the founders thatwinter. It was cold, he was wearing gloves, and he’s sitting in one of these garbage cans inthe middle of London, SSH-ing in remotely to try and nurse it back to health,” recounts Alison Davis, the company’s director of product marketing and strategy. “And they thought, ‘There has to be a better way to remotely manage fl eets of these kinds of embedded devices.’”

In fact, there was. Docker had recently launched its containerization technology, and the co-founders immediately saw that it could work perfectly with the remote, distributed devices that we have come to call the Internet of Things.

With lightweight so� ware running in a Docker container on these devices, Davis says, “when you want to update your device, all you have to do is swap out for a new Docker container, and you’re good to go.”

By the end of 2013, the balena team had ported Docker to an Arm-based chip—the fi rst company to do so—and they began to create a platform to enable users to build, remotely monitor, and manage a fl eet of IoT devices at scale. The platform launched in 2015, and today, balena boasts over 100 customers, supporting products ranging from underwater drones and 3D printing to industrial automation and point of sale.

Originally, balena’s build servers were based on x86 processors by Intel, which is in contrast to the vast majority of IoT devices that use embedded Arm-based processors. To test and deploy code to a fl eet of devices, a customer would do a git push from his or her laptop and send code to the balena build servers. Balena would then emulate the end user’s target architecture in so� ware on top of x86 servers. For instance, for a Raspberry Pi fl eet, balenawould emulate the Arm device using QEMU, run the build & tests, and then send the

“The Packet team was super helpful in getting things set up, including working with us to deploy a custom kernel built to help with RPI1 compatibility. They were also really good about letting us try out the hardware for quite a long time to make sure it fi t our requirements fully.” Cameron Diver | So� ware Engineer

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fi nished Docker container down to the devices.

While this emulation process worked, it was fairly slow and error-prone. When the balena team discovered that Packet off ered powerful Armv8 servers, they were instantly intrigued by the idea of being able to off er “native” Arm builds, and decided to try it out.

“The Packet team was super helpful in getting things set up, including working with us to deploy a custom kernel built to help with rpi1 compatibility,” says Cameron Diver, maintainerof the balena builder. “They were also really good about letting us try out the hardware for quite a long time to make sure it fi t our requirements fully.”

The result? Native Arm builds were as much as fi ve times faster than the emulated builds.

Last summer, balena moved all of its Arm device builds to Packet—and the upside isn’t just that the builds, at under fi ve minutes, are faster. Davis points out that Packet’s bare metal Arm servers enabled them to address a whole new set of projects: “Applications written in certain languages, such as Rust or Golang, weren’t supported in the emulation tool that we were using before. With native Arm builds, we’re able to handle a much wider set of requirements from our users.” (The company still off ers x86 builds for users with x86 devices who want to use them.)

The company’s mission, Davis says, is “to make it easy and approachable to remotely manage and update code running on fl eets of IoT devices.” To that end, the team is constantly working on ways to remove friction points and keep pace with a fast-expanding IoT world.

B U I L D A B E T T E R I N T E R N E T ™

Packet is the leading bare metal cloud for developers. Its proprietary technology automates physical servers and networks without the use of virtualization or multi-tenancy–powering over 60k deployments each month in its 20 global datacenters.

Founded in 2014 and based in New York City, Packet has quickly become the provider of choice for leading enterprises, SaaS companies, and so� ware innovators. In addition to its public cloud, Packet’s unique “Private Deployment” model enables companies to automate their own infrastructure in facilities all over the world. Learn more and view other customer stories at www.packet.com.

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