Show HN: Relay – Event-driven DevOps automation

Relay is an event-driven DevOps platform. It listens to events from 3rd party services like AWS, Datadog, PagerDuty, Jira and more to trigger simpler, smarter workflows that automate tedious tasks. A lot of existing solutions either require a lot of upfront DIY work (AWS Lambda or running your own script) or they weren’t built for DevOps teams (Zapier, IFTTT).

Relay provides out-of-the-box workflows for common use cases like cloud cost optimization, security, incident response and more. If those don't work for you, you can write your own workflow using integrations with dozens of cloud provider services, open source tools and APIs that can be composed together in a YAML-based workflow (yes, I know, more YAML).

Some features we think are interesting:

- Visual execution graph shows exactly what's happening in your workflow run.

- Connections make it simple to authenticate to other services.

- Audit log shows who initiated every workflow run, whether manual or by an external service.

- Human in the loop approvals give you full confidence in your automation.

- Growing community of 30+ open source integrations with AWS, Azure, GCP, Datadog, PagerDuty, VictorOps, Jira, Terraform, Helm, and more.

We also just recently put out a blog post about some pretty novel uses of Knative and Ambassador to create user-generated triggers: https://blog.getambassador.io/user-defined-webhooks-in-puppe...

Great question on why we went with YAML instead of our own DSL. The main reason is, really, YAML has become a bit lingua franca for managing configuration of tools similar to Relay. We wanted to keep Relay simple and make it as familiar as possible. So YAML was our go-to choice.

We have some control flow primitives that you can configure but to do really complicated logic we figured it's best to push that in to the steps versus the configuration (there by keeping the configuration simple). Here's a link to our (very simple) conditional execution docs: https://relay.sh/docs/using-workflows/conditionals/

> Have you any comparisons between this and StackStorm?

Relay is very similar to StackStorm! One of the biggest differences between Relay and StackStorm, however, is that every step and trigger in Relay is just a docker container. You can basically run any container you want, but containers that are authored specifically for Relay are, obviously, better (integration with the execution environment, our secrets management service, etc.).

> is this only going to be a SaaS offering

This is another key difference between Relay and StackStorm: We only offer a SaaS right now. That's not to say that we won't eventually offer a self-hosted version (or some sort of hybrid solution for that matter)--it's just the approach we're going with for now.

Ooh, that makes sense. This is also reminding me a bit of Concourse CI (https://concourse-ci.org) as that's all docker-based too, though last I checked it wasn't as kubernetes-native (which I appreciate)

We have complex flows where we use Slack, Spinnaker(Webhooks), Terraform, PagerDuty ... and much more.

Is there something better that we can achieve with this?