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2019-12-01 23-50-25
Pedro Neto
Champion
Long-Lived Apps for Personal Environments
403Views
7Comments
Implemented
Community

Problem: Personal Environments cost OutSystems unnecessary AWS compute time, but deleting them frustrates developers who lose their apps unless they manually export them.

Idea: Make Personal Environments ephemeral but with automatic daily app snapshots, so they can be safely deleted sooner without hurting the developer experience.

How it works

1. Daily App Snapshots

  • Automatically snapshot all apps/modules once per day.

  • Store snapshots in cheap object storage.

  • Only snapshot OML + metadata (default: no DB data).

  • Developer never loses their apps again.

2. Faster Environment Recycling 

  • Only do this if needed to offbalance the data usage in point 1 

  • Reduce always-on uptime from 7 days to 4 days.

  • After 4 days of inactivity:

    • Kill the AWS compute

    • Keep the daily snapshots

3. Auto-Restore on Spin-Up

When a user requests a new Personal Environment:

  • OutSystems spins up new infra

  • Automatically reinstalls the most recent snapshot

  • Developer resumes instantly with their apps already there

Benefits

For OutSystems

  • AWS savings (compute reduced from 7 to 4 days).

  • Storage cost minimal vs. compute cost.

  • Personal Environments become fully elastic.

For Developers

  • Apps are never lost.

  • Personal Environment deletion becomes painless.

  • Better trust, better onboarding, better learning experience.

25 Nov 2025
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This will certainly stimulate the use of the personal environments and reduce frustation when something is lost again for a developer and a cost reduction for OS +1

25 Nov 2025
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Hi Pedro,

I like your thinking about trying to improve things for both OutSystems and the community.

I think the Personal Environment deletion will still be a pain for most developers, also considering few people "read the manual", they won't understand that their apps won't be lost. Losing data all the time will also be painful - though the workaround would be to bootstrap data.

Additionally, if you develop Forge components and have a "Try Now" for the demo, your personal environment has to be up and running for the demo to work. There would need to be a solution for this issue.

So I think the idea needs more work, so I'm not voting for it at this stage. But please don't take this as a criticism, I love the way you are thinking!

Kind regards,

Stuart

25 Nov 2025
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2019-12-01 23-50-25
Pedro Neto
Champion

Hi Stuart and thank you for your feedback.

I agree that most people won't "read the manual" in a first instance, and they will be angry once the environment is deleted, however they would quickly understand that the apps would there again once they spin the environment up again. 
If outsystems could also save the data and run the needed bootsraps to populate the database on the environment creation this problem would be solved.

This won't solve the "Try now" problem, for that what I've thought in the past was: 

  • If user has any supported component, then mark that environment as long live, and never kill it.
  • Or have a shared environment where all the try nows would run.


26 Nov 2025
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It's frustrating when forge components have a "Try Now" only to find out that the personal environment has been removed.  Maybe your personal environment can not be removed/deactivated if there is a connection in Forge.  This allows developers to build a portfolio of components or applications that they build.

16 Dec 2025
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Or have a shared environment where all the try nows would run.

This seems to be the obvious solution, it's unclear why it wasn't designed this way in the first place.

20 Mar
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UserImage.jpg
Ana Vaz
Staff
Changed the status to
Implemented
on 02 Apr 2026

Hi Pedro,

We have released a feature that will allow us to backup the list of Apps from ODC PEs before they are deleted.The owner of the PE will receive the link to download his apps in the email that alerts the PE has been deleted. This link will be available for 7 days. After that, you can still contact us through support and we can generate a new link. 

This means you can now recover all your work and reinstall in a new PE.

Thank you for sharing your ideas and suggestions.

Ana Vaz

22 Apr
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We still have a problem with personal environments getting deleted when we're sharing links to the apps to demo forge components.

10 days ago
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