A little over a year ago, I built Tentacle PLC as a soft PLC that was easy to deploy with modern Git-based tooling, designed to run on container platforms, written in TypeScript.

I built it as a monolith to keep it simple—proof of concept first, find real production opportunities to test it, learn from actual usage.

That worked. My clients have been running it in production, and we've learned a lot. But now that it's been used at scale, everything running in a single thread is starting to show its weaknesses.

So we're evolving the architecture. Breaking components out into individual packages, using NATS + Jetstream as a high-performance data bus. Each service can be deployed independently and scaled independently.

Early development is already showing benefits: the codebases are drastically simpler, AI-driven coding tools work much better with focused services, and we're looking forward to using different languages and technologies for different components as those benefits present themselves.

Start simple, test in production, refactor based on real data.

#IndustrialAutomation #IIoT #SoftPLC #OpenSource