Flownative is not a web agency taking a lead on typical projects like creating new Neos websites. We usually work well in the background providing guidance, code and knowledge. But Flownative Beach is a project, we did take a lead on – we invested more than 3.000 hours of thinking and coding before we opened our platform to the broad public.

So, this year, we thought: why not hand in Beach for the Neos Award?

Beach is basically a big Flow application, split up into a micro-service architecture which manages a Kubernetes cluster. The Flow application running the user interface, the cluster manager service and some more are event-sourced. Actually, in order to develop Beach, I invested a big amount of time – together with Bastian Waidelich – to create the foundation of the Neos Eventsourcing package. And apart from the actual cluster management, there's of course more, all the billing logic (event-sourced of course), user management, backup management and so on ...

This project is a great example of what can be done with Flow. It's a big application, which has a responsible job. We also consciously took the decision to focus on Neos and Flow and not make it all-purpose, because we think that such an offering can contribute to make Neos more popular. And Local Beach is supposed to be our contribution to the Neos community for a reliable development environment. We have big plans for making development of Neos projects a great experience.

Finally, neos.io and its services have been running - since its beginning - on Beach, even in the beginning when Beach was nothing more than a couple of hand-woven containers ...

All that being said, it was a huge surprise to actually receive the Neos Award in the end, because Beach is not the usual project web agencies hand in. We Flownatives are really happy about this, and grateful to the jury and community to acknowledge those endless nights tinkering on a cloud platform for Neos projects.

Neos Award 2019

Here is an official recap of the award–and in case you want to see our surprised faces, here is the recording of the award ceremony: