So it’s finally time to talk a bit more about what I’ve been up to for the last few months since joining FlowForge Inc.
The FlowForge platform is a way to manage multiple instances of Node-RED at scale and to control user access to those instances.
The platform comes with 3 different backend drivers
- LocalFS
- Docker Compose
- Kubernetes
LocalFS
This is the driver to use for evaluating the platform or as a home user that doesn’t want to install all the overhead that is required for the other 2 drivers. I starts Projects (Node-RED instances) as separate processes on the same machine and runs each one on a separate port. It keeps state in a local SQLite database.
Docker Compose
This version is a little more complicated, it uses the Docker runtime to start containers for the FlowForge runtime, a PostgreSQL database and Nginx reverse proxy. Each Project lives in it’s own container and is accessed by a unique hostname prepended to a supplied hostname. This can still run on a single machine (or multiple if Docker Swarm mode is used)
Kubernetes
This is the whole shebang, similar to Docker Compose the FlowForge platform all runs in containers and the Projects end up in their own containers. But the Kubernetes platform provides more ways to manage the resources behind the containers and to scale to even bigger deployments.
Release
Today we have released version 0.1.0 and made all the GitHub projects public.
The initial release is primarily focused on getting the core FlowForge platform out there for feedback and we’ve tried to make the LocalFS install experience as smooth as possible. There are example installers for the Docker and Kubernetes drivers but the documentation around these will improve very soon.
You can read the official release announcement here which has a link to the installer and also includes a walk through video.