Take a look at balenaCloud if you want to deploy containers to IoT devices. (Disclaimer: happy customer). Their free tier is free forever, too.

Question I couldn't find an answer to (and haven't used balenaCloud yet). How are updates to the OS managed? Will, for example, Raspberry Pi's running belenaOS update themselves and reboot nightly or something like that?

I have a few Raspberry's floating around the house doing odds and ends, and balena seems like a nice option for reducing their management needs. But I really want them to be able to get the latest security/etc updates without me having to manually update each of them from time to time.

balena founder here. balenaOS comes with all the infrastructure needed for robust host OS updates. We expose this functionality to our users via a button in the web dashboard. We don't yet have an automated, rolling upgrade style mechanism.

The main consideration for a feature like this is that sometimes containers have dependencies to interfaces exposed by the operating system which are not always stable. This is especially true for IoT usecases because containers will typically interface with some device connected to the system.

Tangential to this, we're working on an extended support release schedule (a la firefox) for balenaOS. I could see us building an automated OS update mechanism on top of that. We'll definitely think about it, thanks a lot for your feedback :)

Can you use your API to perform the updates?

Btw balena is a great service, good job!

Can you host the control server yourself without public cloud?

Their server component is FOSS and you can self-host. You need to do a bit of extra config on the devices but it’s documented. Disclaimer: I’ve never tried it myself.