Opening our staging environment to the public.
We started resin.io because we ~~wanted~~ needed a modern approach to deploying and maintaining applications running on remote devices. And while the product today is reminiscent of our earliest dreams, there is still an unrelenting stream of new features being built and released.
We strive to keep the time taken from an idea to a deployed feature as short as possible. We’ve streamlined both our development and deployment procedures and have implemented an automated test suite, but still the biggest delay in getting a new feature to production is the need for thorough testing. At the same time we know you want to see features as soon as possible, and give us your thoughts early.
So in the spirit of killing many birds with one stone, we are opening our staging environment to our users. Of course this isn’t anything new, we borrowed the idea from the chromium project. This means you can peek into new features sooner and, as a by-product, our production environment becomes more stable because of the testing upstream.
Our staging environment is a complete duplication of resin.io, down to the website, in a completely separate VPC, and a completely isolated security context. This means you will need to create an account from scratch, as the database shares nothing with the resin.io database. The only difference you will experience is that it reflects a newer version of the resin.io codebase.
This does come with fair warning though. The staging environment is only intended for development purposes. We can not make any guarantees of a feature’s functionality, the system’s uptime or any data persistence. We obviously will strive to make it a fun playground for all, but the fact that it is a testing environment is the reason we can’t make any promises. Use it as a preview, not as a production environment.
Now that the hype and the warnings are out of the way, you can sign up for our staging version of resin.io and stay on the cusp of modern DevOps for embedded devices. Here are just a few of our new features eagerly awaiting you.
Delta updates
Only download an update’s diff to the devices, instead of all uncached container layers. You can watch a full demo below.
It’s easy to use too: just add an *Application Config Variable* with a key of `RESIN_SUPERVISOR_DELTA` and value equal to `1`.
Build logs
View all of your build logs from your resin.io dashboard.
Collaborators
Allow multiple users to access an application.
Configuring config.txt
Allows you to change RaspberryPi config.txt via the API — changing memory splits or HDMI configurations. documentation.
Update strategies
Allows for zero-downtime updates, or killing and deleting the application before download to free space on the device. documentation.
Websocket support for device-urls
This will allow you to run real-time application using web-sockets on device-urls. Read more.
All these will of course make it to production resin before long, but by then new features will be on staging as well!
If you have any questions about our open staging environment you can catch us on gitter or you can submit a support ticket in the same way you would in production(little chat bubble – bottom right).
Cheers,
Team resin.io
