First impression: rename it now while the cost is low. The name is unwieldy.
Ti-ta-no-bo-a
5 syllables.
Agreed that this is unwieldy to say in normal speech.
Show HN: Free hosted open-source alternative to Zapier/Airflow
41–50 of 87 posts
Re: Show HN: Free hosted open-source alternative to Zapier/Airflow
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Very true. We really should stop overloading the term Workflow in software. As of now these are the broad categories that abuse the term workflow. 1. State Machines For example in Jira a bug/ticket moves through different states to reach a final stage. This type of state-machines can be found in a lot of different softwares - most CMS/bug-trackers/CRMs where the entity is different (document/bug/lead). The motive of…
"However, their marketing tries to sell themselves as no-code platform for business folks." Huh? I've never seen Airflow described as no code or tried to sell itself that way, in fact all the pipelines are written in python and you can do some really complex orchestration. I get you're not saying Airflow is no code but that the category you've put it in is typically low code or marketed as low code, but then I don't…
I would agree.
The no-code is an illusion in the enterprise realm - before you know it, you are waist deep in the custom code.
No-code can really work only for small businesses imo.
I come from enterprise background and that is one of the reasons I built Titanoboa - to make something that makes it easy to rapidly prototype new integrations on the fly.
I summed up some of my thoughts on this topic here: https://www.titanoboa.io/repl.html
The main point I am trying to test with Titanoboa is this however:
State Machines Process Designers is a spectrum and one product could handle the entire spectrum (or part of it).
Titanoboa makes it possible to pre-define workflow steps and make it "no code" while also making complex custom integrations possible from the same environment with the same concepts. Plus also distributed data handling is in the mix.
I guess now the challenge is how to market this versatility or whether it could create more confusion...
Re: Show HN: Free hosted open-source alternative to Zapier/Airflow
#43First impression: rename it now while the cost is low. The name is unwieldy.
Ti-ta-no-bo-a 5 syllables. Agreed that this is unwieldy to say in normal speech.
I mostly considered naming to be a distraction from getting the real work done.
I also am probably not good with names as my other alternative was Megalodon (4 syllables) - I just wanted to have some megafauna name.
Happy to hear what you folks would suggest :)
Re: Show HN: Free hosted open-source alternative to Zapier/Airflow
#44How does it compare with Cadence/Temporal?
Re: Show HN: Free hosted open-source alternative to Zapier/Airflow
#45Nicely done. Couple of recommendations:
- Recommend to change your licensing if you want people to try.
- I understand why you want to have AGPL but I don't know many successful OSS projects with this license. There is another HN thread on this topic. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1657071
Re: Show HN: Free hosted open-source alternative to Zapier/Airflow
#46Nice work! How does it compare to n8n? [0] n8n is the closest OSS alternative to Zapier I've seen so far. [0] https://n8n.io/
It's license (fair code) sucks.
That is a fair criticism, I am aware of the AGPL license shortcomings.
I just picked up the more restrictive license at the beginning - being a sole funder and not working on this full time etc. I simply did not want somebody (e.g. a big company with a big team) grabbing my code along the way and running away with it.
Since now Titanoboa got to the shape I envisioned it to be in I am starting to focus more on adoption, so yes I am definitely thinking about switching to less restrictive license since it will probably help.
Also at the beginning I was not aware how badly AGPL is perceived (I always thought if it was good for Mongo it could work for me, but I may have been wrong).
Re: Show HN: Free hosted open-source alternative to Zapier/Airflow
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ti-ta-no-bo-a 5 syllables. Agreed that this is unwieldy to say in normal speech.
I mostly considered naming to be a distraction from getting the real work done. I also am probably not good with names as my other alternative was Megalodon (4 syllables) - I just wanted to have some megafauna name. Happy to hear what you folks would suggest :)
"Dinornis" or "Moa" in maori.
Re: Show HN: Free hosted open-source alternative to Zapier/Airflow
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ti-ta-no-bo-a 5 syllables. Agreed that this is unwieldy to say in normal speech.
I mostly considered naming to be a distraction from getting the real work done. I also am probably not good with names as my other alternative was Megalodon (4 syllables) - I just wanted to have some megafauna name. Happy to hear what you folks would suggest :)
Titano is nice, but may have some trademark issues. Tanobo is easy to say, if a bit generic. Just playing with syllables.
Re: Show HN: Free hosted open-source alternative to Zapier/Airflow
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ok, I have just reached 100 concurrent containers in Europe, which is max at this stage and I don't think I can change the aws limit on the fly (will check though) so I might start killing the oldest instances. Apologies for inconvenience folks, but I am sure people rarely play with each instance for the whole 3 hours anyway at this stage. Honestly did not expect this kind of "public beta" rollout, still surprised ho…
Approaching 100 containers cap in US, so if something does not work, dont be mad :)
If anybody's curious about this "public beta hosting - HN bear hug" performance load test:
I just (sequentially) restarted all 4 servers behind my 2 load balancers - seems that by reaching 100 containers in each geography the provisioning threads may have died after many (unsuccessful) retries, so need to restart the thread pools.
That is one more error I need to handle (or increasing my limit in AWS).
Re: Show HN: Free hosted open-source alternative to Zapier/Airflow
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am using D3. AFAIK nobody has used it for worfklow visualization so far: https://www.titanoboa.io/visualizing-workflows.html
Luigi does some workflow visualization with d3 https://luigi.readthedocs.io/en/stable/index.html
Thanks, wasn't aware of them!