Product Mission Statement and Strategy Updates

It's now been two years since our first ever 0.1.0 release of FlowFuse. In that time, we've been working hard to build out a platform to help users elevate their Node-RED experience. In that time we've delivered some incredibly valuable features to FlowFuse users such as centralized instance management, remote deployments and version control. We've also learned a lot about our users, their needs, and how we can best serve them, and in a recent reflection on our product strategy decided to refine our product mission statement.

#  Product Mission Statement

FlowFuse is used across a range of industries and use-cases, and in the hundreds of conversations we've had with customers, we've found that in every scenario there is a common pattern. So, to reflect ths, we've created a new Product Mission Statement, to make it clear to existing and prospective users of FlowFuse what it is that we're striving for.

Our new mission statement is as follows:

Provide the best way to build, manage and deploy Node-RED applications at scale, in reliable and secure production environments.

We believe that by focusing on this mission, we can better serve our users and provide them with the tools they need to succeed. This mission statement will act as the north star for our product prioritization moving forward, and be our compass to ensure we're staying on track in delivering value to our users.

#  Build

FlowFuse strives to be the best place to build Node-RED applications by providing tools to help users build applications with more confidence.

• Simplified Hosting: Whether you want cloud-hosted instances, or to run Node-RED on edge devices, FlowFuse provides the smoothest experience to setup new Node-RED instances.
• Trust: Certified Nodes ensure Node-RED developers can trust the reliability, quality and security of third-party nodes they're using in their applications.
• Version Control: Snapshots capture point-in-time views of Node-RED flows, environment variables and other configuration settings. We even capture automatic snapshots of your flows every time you deploy, so you can always be confident you have a backup.
• Collaborative Development: We are building FlowFuse to be a platform that enables teams to work seamlessly together on Node-RED applications. From the Team Library, through to Node-RED Multiplayer, we want to make sure that FlowFuse is the best platform for collaborative development in Node-RED.
• Remote Access: FlowFuse provides a secure way to access your Node-RED instances and devices from anywhere in the world, so you can build and debug your applications with ease.

#  Manage

With FlowFuse, it's possible to manage thousands of Node-RED instances, all in one place. We make sure you have a clear picture of what's happening across all of your instances, and provide tools to help you manage them effectively.

• Centralized Management: FlowFuse provides a single entry point to manage all of your Node-RED instances, no matter where they are hosted.
• Security: FlowFuse provides a range of security features to help you keep your Node-RED instances secure. From Two-Factor Authentication to Role-Based Access Control, we're building FlowFuse to be the most secure way to manage your Node-RED instances.
• Frictionless Maintenance: Whether you're updating your Node-RED version, or one of the many third-party dependencies that your applications depend upon, FlowFuse provides tools to make it easy to keep your instances up-to-date and running smoothly.
• Observability: FlowFuse provides tools to help you keep an eye on your Node-RED instances and make sure they're running smoothly. Get alerts when something goes wrong, and use the Audit Logs to help you debug issues when they arise.

#  Deploy

With FlowFuse, we aim to provide the best way to deploy Node-RED applications to production environments, whether that be to hundreds of remote devices, or via staging environments to ensure you can deploy with confidence.

• DevOps: Test your applications in development and staging environments, ensuring you can deploy them with confidence to production.
• Remote Deployments: Deploy your applications to hundreds of remote devices with a single-click, ensuring you can get your applications running in production quickly and easily.
• Reliability: FlowFuse users can have trust that their applications will run without issues with features like High Availability. FlowFuse makes sure users have the tools to monitor and manage the reliability of their applications, including being alerted when things go wrong, and making the recovery as easy as possible.

#  What's Next?

Our development team are busy working on a range of new features to help us deliver on our mission. If you're interested to see what highlight features we're working on for the next release (v2.5) in four weeks time, you can checkout our Development Board on GitHub.

For longer term planning, we have our Product Planning Board, which outlines the features we're working on for the next 12 months. It's subject to change, as we're always iterating, but it gives a good idea of where our focus will likely be in the coming months.

In the mean time, please do reach out if there are any features you'd like to see in FlowFuse, or if you have any feedback on our product strategy. We're always keen to hear from our users and learn how we can better serve you.

#  Read More

If you're interested in learning more about our company and product strategies, you can read more detail in our Handbook:

• Company Strategy
• Product Mission Statement