Kuzzle’s 2020 Year in Review

I know many of us don't want to look back and read a retrospective. On the other hand, we have to admit that despite a difficult year, we remained mobilized and that we can all be proud of the work accomplished... This is the exercise I am proposing below.

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I read the 2019 article, and I found it really interesting to look back over our highlights and take the time to thank the team. So here we go for this year 2020: 

With a growing Discord community, a number of Github issues and contributors that are growing strongly, we feel that this year has been a turning point in the history of Kuzzle.

Throughout the year, we wanted to reinforce what we believe in:

• The compatibility of our backend with the best technologies on the market 
• To be GAFAM free, open source, installable, cloud agnostic, privacy by design 
• The demonstration by example of how scalable our backend is  through our client use cases.

Highlights of the year

In March we wrote an article on the repercussions of containment on our team and it is still relevant today unfortunately. We are used to working remotely, the project and team management has not been changed and we have integrated several people on full remote.

In April, the opening of our new community discussion platform on Discord has not been without emotion:this has allowed us to foster our community, and the response we got exceeded our expectations

We can now create channels by topic and share all our new features in preview and exchange.

We have launched our 4-day remote training offer, and we have to admit that it is working very well, we are ending the year with a lot more trainings given.

In September we were able to meet the entire French IoT ecosystem at the IoT World exhibition. We co-exhibited with our partner Ineo Sense and we proposed a "pick-to-candy" demo. 

You can review some of our (french) conferences such as :

How to choose your IoT platform 

Succeed in its PoC #IoT and ensure the move to scale

Very complete articles have been written about Kuzzle use cases,  such as :

• Finistère, the first "smart grid" departmental territory
• Brittany innovates for energy
• How Bouygues Construction connects its site tools
• IoT at the service of pole fleet management

We are always listed in different articles as an open-source alternative to Firebase, (we are already in the top 5 2021) or studies of mobile backend as a service.

The evolution of Kuzzle backend

Throughout the year we communicated about the new features of our product. Here is an overview of the main 2020 features:

• The release of our new CLI Kourou (which we named kourou in honor of the Ariane rocket launch pad in French Guiana).
• The release of the Dart and JVM SDKs
• The GraphQL plugin to access Kuzzle data
• Typescript support by Kuzzle and Javascript SDK

The three main features of our product are for this end of year:

• The new Admin Console with a new look and new features
• An entirely new way of using Kuzzle, using a framework-like approach, instead of using our plugins system, while still being 100% backward compatible
• The complete rewrite of our documentation

Special thanks

Thanks to the whole team, we have made great progress this year in product design and deployment. We are now at a key stage where we have "proven the concept" by deploying Kuzzle Backend on large scales.

We would like to thank our community for their help and support with a special mention for some contributors such as Prinjidal, Manubaun, Sacha, TitanKing, Gabriel Pulido, Nelands. 

We would also like to thank all our clients for their trust in Kuzzle: in spite of the difficult context, we have gained new customers, others have renewed their support plans, and we provided top notch support to all of them.

This is also the time to thank Samanta, Etienne, Sixtine, Morgan, Yannick who have supported us this year. 

The whole team wishes you all the best for this new year!