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Citizen development empowers employees to create digital solutions. However, it requires guardrails to ensure data security, operational stability, and compliance. These guardrails are what FlowFuse provides to the Node-RED community to level up their deployments. FlowFuse offers many different security measures for authentication and authorization, which all apply to different scenarios.

In this post we’ll take a look at most of them, specifically for HTTP traffic. We’ll discuss the trade-offs for auditabliltiy, convenience to use as either machine or human, among other factors.

FlowFuse is a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform designed to enhance the experience and capabilities of Node-RED for its users. By focusing on scalability, security, and Dev Ops, FlowFuse aims to remove some of the technical barriers associated with using Node-RED, making it easier for citizen developers to automate tasks, process data, and create applications. In this blog post, we will discuss the differences between a FlowFuse instance and a FlowFuse device instance while highlighting how FlowFuse addresses scalability challenges in Node-RED deployments.

Today, with the latest FlowFuse release, an important change was made that updates the resource limits for our open-source, self-managed FlowFuse server tier. This change does not affect FlowFuse Cloud users in any way.

There are two common reasons why new languages come about. They provide a feature missing in the existing programming languages, or it is a tool that is easier to learn and use. The latter often functions like a swiss army knife with each iteration including more and more tools. The journey of low-code is like a swiss army knife, the perfect tool for the Citizen Developer.

With Node-RED 4.0 coming soon, I wanted to take a look at what users can expect to see with the new release, as well as some of the new features we're working on.

Practitioners using Node-RED often find themselves in a situation where a firewall is deployed in their organization. This network configuration is a fact of life and is generally not controlled by the same people using Node-RED. Given security reigns supreme in Industrial IoT (IIoT), and a firewall offers a lot of benefits, we anticipate it will be deployed more often in the future, and as such it’s good to understand how you can get the most out of Node-RED when deployed behind a firewall.

In January 2013, I could have never foreseen that my fun little proof-of-concept project would become Node-RED, an open source low-code environment with millions of deployments in IoT and automation.

As we embark on the journey toward a more interconnected industrial environment, the emergence of a Unified Namespace (UNS) as the fundamental framework for facilitating communication among various systems and devices has become a focal point of discussion. I've often been queried about the role of Node-RED in a UNS architecture. To illuminate this, let's delve into an exemplary UNS architecture, underlining the classic use cases for Node-RED within this framework.

KepserverEX, often referred to as Kepware, is an OPC server that has been the important tool many manufacturing companies have used on their digital transformation journey. It plays an important role for many to extract data from PLCs, Programmable Logic Controllers, without having to directly interact with them.

I'm always thinking about how we can continue to improve the Node-RED experience. One area I like to explore is to make sure we learn the right lessons from the Software Development world.

In this post, I'm going to look at some of the common practices in modern Software Development and show how they translate to the Node-RED world.

Professional services come in many different forms. Anything from setup and configuration, flow development, to node development. In this article, we will cover a few examples of how you can leverage professional services for your Node-RED applications.

At FlowFuse, we're convinced of the Unified Namespace (UNS) architecture for IoT cases. It's a powerful tool that can make information much more readily available and easy to consume. However, as with any architecture, there are times when it's not the best choice. In this blog post, we'll discuss when to use the UNS and when to consider other options.

When starting to roll out a new data distribution architecture for the unified namespace (UNS), one of the first questions you'll ask is, "What broker should I select for my UNS? The broker must implement a publish-subscribe (pub-sub) pattern, though that leaves plenty of options.

Following the release of FlowFuse 1.0 end of 2022, we're excited to release FlowFuse 2.0, marking a significant step in managing Node-RED remote instances, which we call Devices. FlowFuse already was the best place to operate Node-RED at scale in the cloud or on-premise, now it's able to manage Node-RED where ever it's run.