Although concurrency is generally perceived to be a ‘hard’ subject, it can in fact be very simple — provided that the underlying model is simple. The occam-π parallel processing language provides such a simple yet powerful concurrency model that is based on CSP and the π-calculus. This paper presents pony, the occam-π Network Environment. occam-π and pony provide a new, unified, concurrency model that bridges inter- and intra-processor concurrency. This enables the development of distributed applications in a transparent, dynamic and highly scalable way. The first part of this paper discusses the philosophy behind pony, explains how it is used, and gives a brief overview of its implementation. The second part evaluates pony's performance by presenting a number of benchmarks.