Deployment with Balena

Balena Cloud provide a seamless way of building and deploying applications at scale through the conceps of blocks, apps and fleets. Once you have your app deployed, for example our Kerberos Agent, you can benefit from features such as: remote access, over the air updates, an encrypted public https endpoint and many more.

We provide two mechanisms to deploy Kerberos Agent to a Balena Cloud fleet:

Use Kerberos Agent as a block part of your application.
Use Kerberos Agent as a stand-alone application.

Block

Within Balena you can build the concept of a block, which is the equivalent of container image or a function in a typical programming language. The idea of blocks, you can find a more thorough explanation here, is that you can compose and combine multiple blocks to level up to the concept an app.

You as a developer can choose which blocks you would like to use, to build the desired application state you prefer. For example you can use the Kerberos Agent block to compose a video surveillance system as part of your existing set of blocks.

You can the Kerberos Agent block by defining following elements in your compose file.

agent:
    image: bh.cr/kerberos_io/agent

App

Next to building individual blocks you as a developer can also decide to build up an application, composed of one or more blocks or third-party containers, and publish it as an app to the Balena Hub. This is exactly what we've done..

On Balena Hub we have created the []video-surveillance application](https://hub.balena.io/apps/2064752/video-surveillance) that utilises the Kerberos Agent block. The idea of this application is that utilises the foundation of our Kerberos Agent, but that it might include more blocks over time to increase and improve functionalities from other community projects.

To deploy the application you can simply press below Deploy button or you can navigate to the Balena Hub apps page.

You can find the source code, balena.yaml and docker-compose.yaml files in the balena-agent repository.