The article was originally intended at manufacturing companies, not at IT startups, that currently go "all-in" on AWS and Azure with all of their managed services, when actually 95% of their workloads are in virtual machines, and the remaining stuff could easily be handled on a single VM. Or maybe a couple of VMs and a managed postgres somewhere (e.g., maybe even at AWS or Azure).
Would probably give them way more budget in actually building applications than running the infrastructure.
Maybe I'll extend the article to include the point of using a managed postgres at AWS / Azure / fly.io, whatever, in combination with Hetzner VMs.
We have a lot of free info material on the topic of IT and Industrial Automation including Shopfloor KPIs like OEE. And the project behind it, is even open source.
Maybe this is not relevant for all industries, but in our experience in manufacturing it is for most companies an immediate no-go. Because these companies are not interested in using the open-source variant, they want to partner up with the company behind it. And in the case of EMQ, this is additionally quite difficult to pinpoint with whom one will be conducting business with.
I work in a very very (very) similar area to yourself, we should talk one day.
Still not sure I agree, Node-RED for instance is open-source, has no office and the lead developer often develops it streaming on twitch from his home in the Uk. Yes Flowforge are building to offer enterprise support. But we both know and you have written about how Node-RED is eating OT/IT. Both of our offices for instance are in a shared, but different innovation building.
I do find it interesting and misleading, that EMQ X has the line about its innovation centre. And it does perhaps make me think twice about the enterprise support offered.
Just not sure an Open Source project should be ignored because of it.
I wanted to post the same. I am German and I am using it for my daily tasks. It combines the easy to program US layout with easy access to German Umlauts Ä, Ö, Ü, ß.
Highly recommended. No idea though for any other languages other than German.
I would not move it between Node-RED and the PLC but I see other applications of a data diode. We usually create a very small DMZ around each machine and a data diode can additionally protect it (see also a very old article from us: https://docs.umh.app/docs/getting-started/usage-in-productio... )
You could place the data diode as a "firewall" between the internet and the edge PC.
Being a programer I really dislike using Node-RED for complicated calculations as you land up pretty quick into the limitations of "low-code" like version control (some is available in Node-RED but not that good), documentation, other best-practices.
However, for smaller stuff or connecting APIs this is absolutely great as it saves a lot of time around boilerplate stuff like package management, setting up a repo or Docker. We only do this smaller stuff also known as "customer specific configuration" and let our proper programs handle the rest.
Main target group is, like you said similarly, mechanical or industrial engineers with very limited IT knowledge, but still huge process expertise.
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