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 :)
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 :)