[tacLog]

Hey I just had a quick question.

I have been looking at building a project on Balena OS and raspberry pi 0 W. I want to deploy it in a hard to get to place and don't want to have to replace the SD card for a good amount of time.

I was wondering if Balena OS with Balena cloud managing it puts more or less strain the the sd card write cycles than Raspbian.

Chris's application seems to write little or nothing to the sd card so in your experience how would it last? A couple years?

[alexandros]

Hey, balenaOS has been designed for long term deployment. As such, we have a read-only partition for the hostOS. We also have a second host partition so we can update the OS remotely and atomically. In general, we've tuned all sorts of elements in this direction as our customers really don't want to run around collecting sd cards from all over the world.

[tacLog]

Thanks, Have you done any testing on the effect of something like leaving persistent logging on vs off. I know that writes to the state partition which is not read only.

Is there a way to push device logs to another service to keep track of them long term?

How did you come up with the pricing model of essentials vs micro-services?

[alexandros]

Persistent logging is only there for cases we need to debug something, in other words where it's the only choice. Even so, it writes to a circular buffer so it should be reasonably safe. But it's not intended to be on by default, more like an emergency measure. We do push logs to our server to some degree, and some customers use proper devops platforms to manage their logs, but we definitely want to do more in the future.

The pricing model is along the lines of "essentials is for people looking for a better OTA solution whereas microservices is for people who consider their devices mini-servers". So it's more a difference of perspective of the customer that allows us to group features and give more to the one crowd without alienating the other crowd with high prices. Not sure if that makes sense.