How to scale Node-RED with Prescient Designer

Our second webinar, “Prescient Designer: Scaling Node-RED to Enterprise-class IoT Applications” was extremely well received, drawing attendees from all over the world.

Table of Contents

• Node-RED has built a strong foundation for low-code IoT programming

• Scaling with Node-RED is complex due to its single-device focus and distributed workflows

• Prescient Designer supports scaling to thousands of devices with iterative workflows
  

Andy Wang, Prescient Devices’ Founder & CEO, and Pablo Acosta, VP of Engineering, hosted an audience of nearly 100 members of the Node-RED community and other design enthusiasts. The goal was to describe and demonstrate how Prescient Designer leverages key attributes of Node-RED, the leading full-spectrum graphical development environment for event-driven applications, and creates a robust, enterprise-class design tool for IoT applications. You can watch the webinar here.

Node-RED has built a strong foundation for low-code IoT programming

The Node-RED project was started in IBM’s Emerging Technology Services Group in 2013 by Nick O’Leary and Dave Conway-Jones to apply flow-programming techniques to network communications transport protocols. It was open sourced in September 2013 and became one of the founding projects of the JS Foundation in October 2016. Node.JS is used by 90% of Fortune 500 companies. As of 2019, Node-RED had over 2M downloads and over 3000 contributed nodes for a wide variety of applications.

Scaling with Node-RED is complex due to its single-device focus and distributed workflows

While Node-RED’s low-code development framework has enjoyed a great deal of success, its focus on individual edge devices makes it exceedingly difficult to scale to larger deployments without the use of other, often complex, technologies. These technology stacks could include JavaScript, Django, containers, MGINX, security, orchestration, and others.

In addition to requiring multiple technology stacks, scaling Node-RED also requires many steps of an iterative workflow design-local / build / deploy-remote process which occurs at the device, cloud application, and cloud infrastructure level.

Prescient Designer supports scaling to thousands of devices with iterative workflows

Enter Prescient Designer, an agile, low-code, cloud-based design tool which allows an entire flow design to reside in the cloud with edge algorithms quickly deployed to hundreds or thousands of devices at the click of a button. In addition, Prescient Designer is an enterprise-class application with distributed programming, end-to-end security, recovery & rollback, remote collaboration, built-in communication, application template solutions, and more.

Using Prescient Designer, Pablo Acosta quickly and easily created a sample workflow and deployed it to multiple edge devices in real-time.

Got a Project?

Do you have an enterprise-class project that can leverage Node-RED and Prescient Designer’s capabilities? Feel free to reach out for a free Technology Assessment and a Community Subscription to Prescient Designer.