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Show HN: Hatchet v1 – A task orchestration platform built on Postgres

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Re: Show HN: Hatchet v1 – A task orchestration platform built on Postgres

#11

Post by darkteflon »

abelanger wrote: post #3
digdugdirk wrote: post #2

Interesting! How does it compare with DBOS? I noticed it's not in the readme comparisons, and they seem to be trying to solve a similar problem.

Yep, durable execution-wise we're targeting a very similar use-case with a very different philosophy on whether the orchestrator (the part of the durable execution engine which invokes tasks) should run in-process or as a separate service. There's a lot to go into here, but generally speaking, running an orchestrator as a separate service is easier from a Postgres scaling perspective: it's easier to buffer writes to…

Hatchet looks very cool! As an interested dilettante in this space, I’d love to read a comparison with Dagster.

Re DBOS: I understood that part of the value proposition there is bundling transactions into logical units that can all be undone if a critical step in the workflow fails - the example given in their docs being a failed payment flow. Does Hatchet have a solution for those scenarios?

Re: Show HN: Hatchet v1 – A task orchestration platform built on Postgres

#12

Post by bomewish »

Why not fix all the broken doc links and make sure you have the full sdk spec down first, ready to go? Then drop it all at once, when it’s actually ready. That’s better and more respectful of users. I love the product and want y’all to succeed but this came off as extremely unprofessional.

Re: Show HN: Hatchet v1 – A task orchestration platform built on Postgres

#13

Post by abelanger »

darkteflon wrote: post #11
abelanger wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, durable execution-wise we're targeting a very similar use-case with a very different philosophy on whether the orchestrator (the part of the durable execution engine which invokes tasks) should run in-process or as a separate service. There's a lot to go into here, but generally speaking, running an orchestrator as a separate service is easier from a Postgres scaling perspective: it's easier to buffer writes to…

Hatchet looks very cool! As an interested dilettante in this space, I’d love to read a comparison with Dagster. Re DBOS: I understood that part of the value proposition there is bundling transactions into logical units that can all be undone if a critical step in the workflow fails - the example given in their docs being a failed payment flow. Does Hatchet have a solution for those scenarios?

Re DBOS - yep, this is exactly what the child spawning feature is meant for: https://docs.hatchet.run/home/child-spawning

The core idea being that you write the "parent" task as a durable task, and you invoke subtasks which represent logical units of work. If any given subtask fails, you can wrap it in a `try...catch` and gracefully recover.

I'm not as familiar with DBOS, but in Hatchet a durable parent task and child task maps directly to Temporal workflows and activities. Admittedly this pattern should be documented in the "Durable execution" section of our docs as well.

Re Dagster - Dagster is much more oriented towards data engineering, while Hatchet is oriented more towards application engineers. As a result tools like Dagster/Airflow/Prefect are more focused on data integrations, whereas we focus more on throughput/latency and primitives that work well with your application. Perhaps there's more overlap now that AI applications are more ubiquitous? (with more data pipelines making their way into the application layer)

Re: Show HN: Hatchet v1 – A task orchestration platform built on Postgres

#14

Post by throwaway9w4 »

abelanger wrote: post #9
wilted-iris wrote: post #8

This looks very cool! I see a lot of Python in the docs; is it usable in other languages?

Thanks! There are SDKs for Python, Typescript and Go. We've gotten a lot of requests for other SDKs which we're tracking here: https://github.com/hatchet-dev/hatchet/discussions/436

Is there any documentation of the api, so that someone can call it directly without going through the sdk?

Re: Show HN: Hatchet v1 – A task orchestration platform built on Postgres

#15

Post by abelanger »

bomewish wrote: post #12

Why not fix all the broken doc links and make sure you have the full sdk spec down first, ready to go? Then drop it all at once, when it’s actually ready. That’s better and more respectful of users. I love the product and want y’all to succeed but this came off as extremely unprofessional.

Really appreciate the candid feedback, and glad to hear you like the product. We ran a broken links checker against our docs, but it's possible we missed something. Is there anywhere you're seeing a broken link?

Re SDK specs -- I assume you mean full SDK API references? We're nearly at the point where those will be published, and I agree that they would be incredibly useful.

Re: Show HN: Hatchet v1 – A task orchestration platform built on Postgres

#16

Post by abelanger »

throwaway9w4 wrote: post #14
abelanger wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! There are SDKs for Python, Typescript and Go. We've gotten a lot of requests for other SDKs which we're tracking here: https://github.com/hatchet-dev/hatchet/discussions/436

Is there any documentation of the api, so that someone can call it directly without going through the sdk?

We use gRPC on our workers. All API specs can be found here: https://github.com/hatchet-dev/hatchet/tree/main/api-contrac...

However, the SDKs are very tightly integrated with the runtime in each language, and we use gRPC on the workers which will make it more difficult to call the APIs directly.

Re: Show HN: Hatchet v1 – A task orchestration platform built on Postgres

#18

Post by darkteflon »

abelanger wrote: post #13
darkteflon wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hatchet looks very cool! As an interested dilettante in this space, I’d love to read a comparison with Dagster. Re DBOS: I understood that part of the value proposition there is bundling transactions into logical units that can all be undone if a critical step in the workflow fails - the example given in their docs being a failed payment flow. Does Hatchet have a solution for those scenarios?

Re DBOS - yep, this is exactly what the child spawning feature is meant for: https://docs.hatchet.run/home/child-spawning The core idea being that you write the "parent" task as a durable task, and you invoke subtasks which represent logical units of work. If any given subtask fails, you can wrap it in a `try...catch` and gracefully recover. I'm not as familiar with DBOS, but in Hatchet a durable parent task and chil…

Perfect - great answer and very helpful, thanks.

Re: Show HN: Hatchet v1 – A task orchestration platform built on Postgres

#19

Post by KraftyOne »

digdugdirk wrote: post #2

Interesting! How does it compare with DBOS? I noticed it's not in the readme comparisons, and they seem to be trying to solve a similar problem.

(DBOS co-founder here) From a DBOS perspective, the biggest differences are that DBOS runs in-process instead of on an external server, and DBOS lets you write worklflows as code instead of explicit DAGs. I'm less familiar with Hatchet, but here's a blog post comparing DBOS with Temporal, which also uses external orchestration for durable execution: https://www.dbos.dev/blog/durable-execution-coding-compariso...

Re: Show HN: Hatchet v1 – A task orchestration platform built on Postgres

#20

Post by avan1 »

Don't want to steal your topic but I had written a lightweight task runner to learn GoLang [0]. Would be great to have your and others' comments. It works only as a Go library.

[0] https://github.com/oneapplab/lq

P.S: far from being alternative to Hatchet product

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