Hi Everyone,I’m currently exploring OutSystems Developer Cloud (ODC) and want to know from community members who have real‑time, hands‑on project experience with it.I would really appreciate your insights and guidance. I’m specifically interested in hearing about: 1. Real Project Experience in ODC : Has anyone developed production-grade applications in ODC? What was your experience like—pros, cons, lessons learned? 2. Benefits of ODC Over OutSystems 11 (O11) From your real experience: What advantages did you see in performance, architecture, flexibility, or overall development experience? Is the cloud-native approach noticeably beneficial? 3. Migration Insights (O11 → ODC): If anyone has attempted or completed a migration: What are the key things to take care of before migrating? What challenges or blockers did you face during migration? Any recommendations, best practices, or preparation tips? 4. Licensing & Cost Perspective: Are there any cost benefits when using ODC compared to O11? How does licensing differ in real-world scenarios? 5. Security Considerations:From your experience, how does ODC compare with O11 in terms of security posture? Any improvements or concerns you've observed? Your real-world inputs will be extremely valuable—not just to me, but to many others evaluating ODC for upcoming projects.Thanks in advance, and looking forward to your responses!
Hey Ajit,
I can speak a little on this. 2 years ago I converted an OS11 application to ODC.
1. ODC streamlined a lot of things for the developer, particularly with DevOps and production support. I have been 1 developer doing end-to-end support and without ODC this wouldn't be possible for me.
Depending on how you do your architecture, one approach I do is making each app independent as possible. Basically I have a portal with a bunch of mini apps. ODC containerizes each app into its own separate instance, which makes performance work very well for scaling especially.I have almost instant production support and can fix things extremely fast, I am also able to deliver requirements and work at an extremely fast pace.
When the app starts becoming monolithic, think about how you can separate it out into its own app that you include. I prefer this because it lets me isolate incidents without having wide spread effect through the whole app and keeping a separation of concerns. Its extremely fast to fix an issue, just deploy that app, and its done.2. I prefer ODC. OS11 has some issues with deployments and having to use LifeTime and then you get into sort of a dependency nightmare depending how large your application gets with all the different layers. You essentially don't need a BL or CS layer like a traditional OS11 app, its all in one app now.
3. It is a paradigm shift between OS11 and ODC, development patterns are a bit different, but once you get the hang of it, its pretty good. I truly love ODC since I started using it. It will take a bit to get used too. Its having one app doing it all vs having all these layers that you have to update and maintain. Using API calls is great, you can slap them in a library that all your apps can use, which is way better than how you had to do it in OS11. The library gets included in the container for the associated app when deployed to production and you have version control. So app 1 can be on 1.1 while app 2 is on 1.2.
4. Licensing and cost isn't bad, you get a lot for what you pay for. I think this tends to be at your discretion what you are willing to pay for, but it is worth it. Typical licensing revolves around AOs and then how many users which scale as you grow. They have some other added benefits like Private Gateway, IP filtering, and then of course Sentry.
5. Security is v good in ODC. The role management system locks down entire screens and all relevant actions and entities on that page. Its good to maintain good security practices though with IDORs on entities and locking down sensitive information. The logging is v robust and when done correctly it is very hard to get into data you are not suppose too. I have had multiple of our Cybersecurity folks poke through the app trying to break things and they have little luck.I hope this helps and please reach out to me if you have any questions!
Hello.
1. I entered the ODC world in mid-2023, when it was still new, and unmentioned in the forum. Only official documentation to guide us.As I had studied the O11 to ODC path, it was easy to get into it in development (the same) and architecture (different, but still made some sense). The users were the only real difference. Nothing of what you read prepares you to it. You really need to start using to see how different it is and how limited you were (now we have an API to do most tasks).There is also a few seconds of delay between publishing and seeing the changes. It can trick the developers.
2. Overall for most projects you will not see differences. OutSystems is still OutSystems. ODC is the answer to the cloud-native movement. If you want to do cloud-native, here is how. If you are happy with how things were, you can stay there.OutSystems is pushing to "start with ODC". I still say "start with O11 and do ODC immediatelly after" so you see the differences and are ready for both.4. They are very similar in both the free personal version and the enterprise version. I think you will easily spend 10% more AOs in ODC if you go into it thinking as a O11 developer, but if you go with an ODC mindset it will be about the same.If you start using AI, the cost will rise, of course.5. ODC is as safe as O11, with an extra layer. Also, hackers are still not fully aware of it so defense has a good lead against the attackers for now. O11 is constantly being tested by people with malicious intent (and winning) so ODC should be safe for even longer. (as long as developers follow the security rules, it should be safer).personally I can't get used to the new logs so I'd still rather monitor O11, but from what I heard they are or will be a lot more detailed in ODC.