Node-RED – ZJ van de Weg, FlowForge

This is texturing TV. Hey everyone, welcome back to text drug TV. I've got an exciting open source project to share with you now in a company one of the company's behind it and fostering it.

I want to introduce you to ZJ and zj's real name for those of you out there and I'm gonna mess this up and I'm gonna do the best I can is zaggion vandeweg and that's not right. But ZJ say your name correctly for all the folks here. All right.

I was close. I'm missing I don't I just don't have that Dutch. I'm practicing it because we'll we'll be in Amsterdam in April for kubecon and looking forward.

You'll be my first trip to hamster damn actually, so I'm really looking forward to that. Yeah, you'll love it. Yeah, so DJ tell us a little bit about yourself.

Let's start there. Um, yeah, so I'm CJ and by background is in Computer Sciences and from there on out. I joined this small startup called gitlab back in the day and started there as an intern and works and first on the platform and later on the ci/cd systems and later I transitioned into everything gets related making the data available and storing and securely later also replicating.

It's was a very exciting time and then I transitioned into distro at flow Forge where we're bringing the note Reds products and ecosystem to production ready and Enterprise ready state with our company called flow Forge. Love it. That was a mouthful of stuff right there.

Let's try to take it apart one at a time. Yeah Criswell. Congratulations on gitlab.

I'm sure was a tremendous Growing Experience for you as as you know it as the company grew all the way through to where it is today, we of course, you know friends with Sid and the whole gitlab team from early on and happy to see this success. So you mentioned the company you're with now is called flowforge. Right?

Exactly. That's yellow wforge and flow Forge is is providing service product around an open source project called node-red and node de red Correct. Let's start with no dread first and then we'll get to flow Forge.

Okay, tell us a little bit about no dread kind of what it does how it get started what it's about. Yeah. So grants is an eight year old projects already started out of IBM and it is a project where you can drag and drop a solution together and it's a flow based way of programming and it's built on onto no JS and it's literally track and drop.

So if you can use Excel you can program really and this is use very extensively from home automation to deep iot Solutions where it's accessing data obtaining the data normalizing the data and then sending it elsewhere and it's used by a lot of people that don't have like a CS degree computer science degree. They weren't taught to actually do this, but now have the have the skills to build Solutions as as Developers. And yeah, so what's unique about no dreads that there's an ecosystem around it.

There's plugins where you can drag and drop it. So for example, you have a built-in ACP server where you can serve requests and take the data and then drag and drop it to a new protocol of your choosing. This could be FTP or mqtt or you can store it in a database.

It's super flexible and there's already four thousand Integrations. So usually anyone you can drag and drop it together. I don't know how much you know, I'm gonna assume, you know a lot more than I know tell us about sort of the origins of no dread and how it was started and how the community sort of coalesced around that.

Yes, so it was first an internal to as IBM. So the co-founder of the company NeXT started it because he was doing about the same job over and over again in the early days of iot. So early days of iot there was this protocol mqtt to pass messages around on unstable connections and he was debugging it and wrote a tool to do so and then on a evening was basically playing with a canvas in HTML and figures hold on.

I can combine these two sets of knowledge and then make a low programming way of just quickly drag and dropping things together so we can debug it quicker or normalized data and then send it on to another mqtt broker. You saw the value in there, but also recognized if it's only mqtt and if it's only me building this. That's not going to fly and we don't have an ecosystem and the utility of the of the set of the tool I'm building is not as big as if I open source this so then it went through the whole process as IBM to open source.

It's to which they agreed and from there on out build a community. And yeah, the community adoption has been amazing. It's used for example in home automation a lot.

But also very often in Industry type settings where they use a lot of mqtt but also OPC UA all these protocols come together and what's unique about industry and what no red really source for them. That is Hardware. That is 80 years old one of a 30 years old story.

So 30 year old Hardware is talking to the clouds, which is coming up with new protocols every day. And with no dread they can drag and drop an old protocol multiples for example to an SRI bucket in AWS literally in seconds. agreed You know.

Trent well, this is a almost like no fun. Let's Swiss army knife type of open source project. There's a lot of different uses here current status of the project who may is it just an independent maintained is a part of like a foundation or anything.

What's it's part of the audience Foundation. It's technical committee that that runs the projects, but it's in many respects of very Community Driven projects. Mmm, excellent just while we're at it website or get GitHub or so people can guess the website.

com. And then it gets a repo is github/flow for slash flow Forge. That's the main repository.

You can host it on kubernetes Docker or on your local machine everything works out of the box and you get the way to run no dreads with multiple users in a scalable environment with security defaults. Okay. Let's focus on the commercial entity now though.

Yeah, no dread. Does this many things I can do this many things, right? Yeah.

But with flow for June not really looking to do that many things you have a very specific kind of use case. Why don't we dive into that a little bit? Yes.

The way our pricing is structured recently price out hobbyists most of the time and right now we're mostly focusing on industry because there was natural adoption for no dreads already and the problems we've solved over the past one and a half years of development. We're most prominent at their instances. For example industry these days it could well be an argat environment.

So how do you process data if the cloud is not available, but you do want to keep up with the changes of the environment like we're not in the 90s anymore. So people expect Devils. How do you get devops in Industry going?

That is usually For every resistant to change and that's what we're trying to solve with flow Forge. So we'll provide tooling to go from basically development environments to staging review it and upgrade to production provide multi-tenancy with raw best access controls all the modern feature sets. excellent and what we mentioned the website now, there's a big use case with RPA here, right?

Yes. Yeah, there's definitely a big use case. There's there's a lot of adoption on that front as well.

And this is one of the reasons we we start us with our sass offering as well. There's just a cloud host. It's there's no really real problems to maintain the hardware already infrastructure at all will manage is all for you and you get to use the same industry the same plugins that the whole note that's a community already provides regardless of your industry.

So using the SAS offering there's no. degradation of any of the plug all of the plugins that work With the node-red open source work in the SAS as well because that's well. That's a lot of useful enough recover.

Yeah. Yeah. So some of these plugins are reading a temperature from a sensor.

So if the sensor is not connected to your Docker container, there's no real using using those and it would be better just to do an API call to one of the better services. So those obviously won't work and there's a there's a large set of those you have to be connected to the hardware where it's actually works but nonetheless people want to sometimes develop in the cloud and then transition and push that solution to and actually location and that's where we ate them. So they can still install the notes or they can work on their desk locally boost their changes to the clouds and from there on our drawings to one or many devices.

However remote these are great. CJ, you know when we talk about low code no code kind of solutions. It could be a loaded term some people get very upset with that term.

I don't know if you've run into this, you know in my mind. It's kind of two camps. There's what I call the citizen developer people, right?

These are people who are not developers. They don't claim to be developers. They're not even necessarily in the development team.

They might be on a business team or you know HR team or something, but they need an app relative. You know for them someone I don't want to categorize them all as simple. but a relatively Simple app that I can build without having to go to my development team and make it a You know a year-long project and now you want to use a low code no code tool for that.

Yeah, because it helps. Then there's the kind of let's call them professional developers who say look. I could save time and effort using a good low code no code tool to get the functionality.

I need and build around it. Would you say who's the audience here for no dread do you think? I'm gonna cheat I'm gonna say both.

Okay, so and what's interesting is there's a there's a function notes which basically gives you a JavaScript environments in node dreads. So what you'll see is that people who have their own rent, like I know how to develop but now we're using this tool they'll use the the function notes a lot. And then after while they understand that dragging dropping, for example, the filter notes is much easier than just calling this function in the function of yourself.

So eventually don't transition to a common language as basically any language. So wherever if you pick up rust from tomorrow and you start from JavaScript, you'll reach for tools, you know, because you're successful that way. So yeah, I'm not gonna choose a camp between no codes and low codes but the low codes of node Reds there are circumstances where you just need to write code because what you're doing is so specific to you your your use case.

It's not worth writing the custom note because if you want to provide drag and drop interface, you need to program this node. If you're gonna do that for one use case that's not efficient. So that's why the function notice there and a function notes serves as an own ramp for a lot of developers where they'll start with the function note and then later understand there's all these tools in my tools box now which I can drag and drop instead of program and type.

And because of the function nodes node red is really a low coat after while. There are just circumstances where it's easier to to Google. How do I do this in JavaScript?

Then install five new custom nodes and figure out how these wires together properly. Got it. Excellent, man.

Hey ZJ, as I mentioned it's only a 15 minute interviewer over that already. But you know what? I'm glad you gave our audience a little bit of a peek into here into both no bread is as well as the company website one more time in case people missed it.

com. Yeah, actually hey come back and keep us posted. You know, it's enjoy your time and soon.

Yeah. April looking forward to it should be a great kubecon. No Cloud nativecon as well.

Anyway, we're gonna take a break here on techstruck TV. We'll be back in just a minute.