FRED (cloud node-red) end of life

[lcw731]

Received this email this morning. I never set it up, but may be of interest to anyone who is using it.

We are closing the FRED service - please read this email for required actions


Dear FRED customer,

sadly, we are announcing the end of the FRED Cloud Node-Red service. We have been running the service for over 5 years and during that time have interacted and supported many great customers including yourselves! We are proud to have been a small part of the great Node-RED community and will continue to work with both Node-RED and the community as Sense Tecnic evolves. However, the FRED service is no longer a main focus at Sense Tecnic and as such we have taken to decision to close it down by Dec 31st 2022.

Here are a few things you might want to consider:

Saving/Downloading your flows

If you have flows on FRED that you want to keep, you must export (download) those flows before the end of the year. After Dec 31st, the service will no longer be accessible and you will not be able to access your flows.

We have written a short guide showing how to save your flows to a local file.

Exporting your Node-RED flows from FRED

Migrating to an alternative service

For some of our customers, you may be interested in moving your flows across to a cloud service similar to FRED. We recommend moving to the FlowForge platform, which has many similarities to FRED. FlowForge only offers paid tiers (similar to the FRED Tall, Grande and Venti tiers), but if you are interested in using FlowForge we have negotiated discounts for FRED customers when using the FlowForge platform. You can use the following codes when you sign-up with FlowForge:

1. Use the code: FREDTALL if you have a Tall account with FRED
2. Use the code: FREDGRANDE if you have a Grande account with FRED
3. Use the code: FREDVENTI for a Venti account

We have already worked with several customers to migrate their flows across and have found it to be a simple process for most flows. To help, we have written a migration guide to help move your flows over: Please see:

Migrating your Node-RED flow from FRED to FlowForge

Education guides - NodeRedGuide and the STS developer sites and tutorials

As part of our community efforts, we wrote the NodeRedGuide site back in 2017 and have continued to maintain it. We know many of you have benefited from its simple and concise introduction to Node Red and we plan to continue to maintain it as a service to the community.

Equally, we have over the years written a large number of tutorials, many of which have ended up on the NodeRedGude site, or the Sense Tecnic Developer Site. Again we plan to maintain these guides as a community service and will be updating them over the coming months.

Thanks!

Many thanks for your support over the years - we continue to be big fans of Node-RED and will continue to use it in our other projects. We hope to meet some of you at Node-RED community events, both on and offline, over the coming years!

The Sense Tecnic Team

[ronv42]

Another example of cost of cloud services. I am seeing this on many platforms that offered services for free or below cost that was expected to be covered by paid services. Microsoft announced that Outlook.com email storage would be counted against your allotment of OneDrive. Amazon removing unprofitable divisions and stopping some AWS research. Cloudflare services are going to get new tiers of services that will move things around and probably cost more in their new tiers. Heroku owned by SalesForce removing the free hobbyist Node abilities. Yep we are heading into the reality that nothing is free.