OutSystems NextStep Announcements: Project NEO

# The Next-Generation Platform for an elite cloud software delivery #

(Target audience: Business Directors, Program Managers, Architects)

On November 2021, at the OutSystems annual event NextStep (a technology conference focused on business transformation and product innovation), a “Next-Generation Platform” was presented as “Codename: Project Neo”.

Paulo Rosado (OutSystems CEO) mentioned that Project Neo was the icon of OutSystems community. A reference to all users who every day explore this technology’s boundaries. Project Neo strategically places OutSystems as an “elite cloud software company” delivering “serious productivity for serious apps”.

The new technology of OutSystems can be used in Public and Private clouds, or as Local Deployment. The reduced efforts for customers to build an infrastructure and provisioning faster software deliveries, decreases projects risks and dcosts. Now everything can be changed fast with a minimum impact, supported by modern CI/CD capabilities.

Design Principles

Three principles are behind the foundational design of Project Neo:

1. Fast (serious apps for serious productivity)
2. Right (speed and availability for all non-functional requirements)
3. For Future (always on and updated with new services continuously)

Core Architecture

Fifteen characteristics of Project Neo architecture:

1. Built over a modern cloud foundation of Linux containers and Kubernetes — for increased scalability.
2. Full framework .NET 6 — an updated stack for increased performance and security.
3. Fully integrated modern OAuth2 token identity — for additional security options.
4. Aurora PostgreSQL — with fit-for-purpose storage, no-down-time and auto-scaling enabled.
5. Modern Global CDN Acceleration — for performance and security, with edge path acceleration, caching and firewalls.
6. Open Telemetry — for higher compliance with low effort, open logs and events.
7. Platform & Runtime Separation — for a stronger isolation, separated environments and application databases.
8. Microservices Platform — for enabling platform changes without down-time, isolated services and containerization.
9. Auto-Scale On Demand — scaling capacity to allow a larger number of simultaneous developers and users.
10. Events and messaging based orchestration — for scalability, a full stack of asynchronous events communication.
11. Platform Storage options fit for purpose — additional security and storage options, as secret objects stored outside transaction databases, in cryptographic vaults.
12. Global routing at Network Layer — for increased security, availability, performance, enabling business continuity and disaster recovery.
13. Security by design — increased security, with web application firewall scanning and end-to-end encryption.
14. Ring-based deployment — improvements on pipeline delivery and upgrade speed adjusted to each organization risk level.
15. Rest API & Messaging — improved architecture, core APIs with open standard principles.

Wrap Up

Project Neo and current platform (P11) will coexist side-by-side and both improved continuously by OutSystems.

The new platform architecture allows hundreds of millions of users, millions of transactions. It aims to achieve productivity at scale, with several applications and multiple development teams.

“Project Neo gives to a developer, the power of an entire team of technologists, by using modern cloud capabilities.”

Suitable for those organizations looking to: run mission-critical applications; managing complex application portfolios; have strict security requirements; need scalability; and all done in a simple way.

Project Neo will be available to general public in 2022.

Until then stay tuned!

Sources:

NextStep/OSDC 2021: https://www.outsystems.com/nextstep/

Project Neo: https://www.outsystems.com/platform/project-neo/

Early Access Program: https://www.outsystems.com/eap/