Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Inngest 1.0 – Open-source durable workflows on every platform

inngest.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 55 posts

Show HN: Inngest 1.0 – Open-source durable workflows on every platform

#1

Post by tonyhb »

Hi HN! I’m Tony, one of the co-founders of Inngest (https://inngest.com/)

Inngest is an open-source durable workflow platform that works on any cloud. Durable workflows are stateful, long running step functions written in code, which automatically retry on failure. It abstracts everything about queues, event streams and state for you, letting you focus on code. Some examples of uses: managing stateful AI chained step functions; managing search/rag indexes and data pipelines; integrations and webhooks; billing and payment flows.

Technical details: unlike other solutions, we put lots of effort into designing our SDK’s step.run APIs to make them extremely easy to use — developer experience is the most important thing for us.

We had to design and build our own queueing system to work with multi-tenancy, batching, and debouncing, and we’re iterating on this as we move to FoundationDB. It’s largely all Go in the backend, with a bunch of caching, clickhouse, event streams, and coordination on our behalf. Workers are shared nothing, and run based off of the queue and execution state.

We did a post last year as we iterated on our TS SDK. The product has changed a lot since then and wanted to show the community what’s changed as we reach 1.0:

    * Golang, Java, and Python SDKs with cross-language function invocation (across clouds, too)

    * Multi-tenant aware flow control (concurrency, throttling, debounce)

    * Batching, grouping many events into a single function call

    * Much improved dashboard, with tracing and metrics built in

    * Advanced recovery tools like function replay, temporary pausing,  bulk cancellation (with optional expressions).  No more dead letter queues!

    * Branch deploys built in, with staging env support out of the box

    * Full local testing with production parity
There's a ton on the roadmap, with more launching next week. We’re hiring systems & infra engineers, too — it’s a fun job with lots of challenges!

Wanted to say thank you to the HN community for feedback so far! Happy Friday :)

Show HN: Inngest 1.0 – Open-source durable workflows on every platform
inngest.com

Re: Show HN: Inngest 1.0 – Open-source durable workflows on every platform

#2

Post by arez »

Really great product, I'm using inngest since 2-3 months and it definitely solved our problem. We needed a scheduling, queue, trigger solution. The docs are fairly good and it worked after some fiddling with our setup. I can quickly see every morning if all the jobs went through, we also starting to use them for webhooks now. Very happy, wrote at least 10 different functions in typescript so far

Re: Show HN: Inngest 1.0 – Open-source durable workflows on every platform

#4

Post by tonyhb »

ddmkr_conveo wrote: post #3

Congrats on the launch! I am curious, how does your multitenant system work? And how do you ensure fairness?

Thanks! There are a few things at play. High level, it's important to note we provide infra for you — so our multi-tenancy supports many tenants for every user.

In general, fairness means distributing work evenly amongst all accounts. This largely means partitioned queues. Firstly, every functions have their own queues. We have queues of queues: queues of functions available. And then we have queues of accounts. And so on. It's like nesting dolls all the way down.

There are lots of really fine details to get right: continuations, step parallelism, `connect()` with long running workers all mess with fairness, as do batching, debounce, throttling.

We wrote about it in some detail here: https://www.inngest.com/blog/building-the-inngest-queue-pt-i.... We'll probably do some deeper dives on this next year, too!

Re: Show HN: Inngest 1.0 – Open-source durable workflows on every platform

#5

Post by tomredman »

Wow, I had no idea you weren’t at 1.0 yet lol. I’ve been using Inngest for a few years(!) and it’s always felt really polished and complete to me.

Congrats on the big one-oh. Question: I’ve been using Rust a lot more lately — does Inngest work natively with Rust? Is there an SDK or another way to use it?

Re: Show HN: Inngest 1.0 – Open-source durable workflows on every platform

#8

Post by ljm »

Used this for a short while and the dev experience was great (the console in particular which allowed for copying events to reproduce them locally). The typescript integration was good.

My only issue was that the execution of an inngest function wasn't completely intuitive, at least in TS, and you have to think in terms of inngest or, more precisely, the abstraction it is providing. Is it an actor, a step function, an event consumer, a saga? or a combination of some?

When you get used to it it's nice, less overhead than building your own actor model or your own event sources, and really good visibility into what is happening.

Post reply on HN