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

Inngest raises $3M seed to build the reliable workflow platform for every dev

inngest.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 37 posts

Re: Inngest raises $3M seed to build the reliable workflow platform for every dev

#21

Post by goodoldneon »

aliasxneo wrote: post #14
hobofan wrote: post #10

"every dev" = every JS/TS dev I'm not sure when it started, but I feel like there has been an recent increase of "for every dev" or "for everyone" in marketing copy of tools like these. Though, if you look into it for just a minute it's not a polyglot tool that at the core exposes e.g. a REST API that could be talked to in any language, but a "library + SaaS" for a very specific subset of developers (though not a sma…

Yeah, this has been pretty universal, lately. As a primarily Go/Rust/Python developer, it continues to baffles me how these languages continue to be the "default."

[Inngest engineer]

Half of us are Go devs, so we definitely don't think TypeScript should be the default language everyone uses. We only chose to start with a TypeScript SDK!

Re: Inngest raises $3M seed to build the reliable workflow platform for every dev

#22

Post by throwawaymaths »

tonyhb wrote: post #11
hobofan wrote: post #10

"every dev" = every JS/TS dev I'm not sure when it started, but I feel like there has been an recent increase of "for every dev" or "for everyone" in marketing copy of tools like these. Though, if you look into it for just a minute it's not a polyglot tool that at the core exposes e.g. a REST API that could be talked to in any language, but a "library + SaaS" for a very specific subset of developers (though not a sma…

Hah, I get it. We actually have an alpha Go SDK out, and an Elixir SDK in progress. The cool thing is you can switch languages and clouds, deploy a new endpoint, and function state carries over for zero downtime migrations. https://github.com/inngest/inngestgo https://github.com/darwin67/ex-inngest

Just fyi:

Neither are critical but I recommend your repo have underscore instead of hyphen for an elixir project, and using "ex" in the name of your project is generally (informally) considered to be a signal for low code quality in the community.

Re: Inngest raises $3M seed to build the reliable workflow platform for every dev

#23

Post by tonyhb »

vikp wrote: post #17
tonyhb wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The simple case is simple, but anything beyond that can get challenging. Some examples: Multi-step functions. This requires chained jobs, and your dependencies get messy. Operating this kind of sucks. Change management here is hard. It's much easier and faster to write a single function using Inngest; basically any engineer can do it without learning infrastructure. Absence of events/activity (eg. when a user adds a…

I actually agree, which is why I wrote the comment. It is easy to create background tasks. Dramatiq can even handle some of the cases you mentioned - multi-step, fan-out, and retries. It is hard to scale background tasks when you hit a high level of concurrency, as you've mentioned. Your press releases makes it sound like the initial setup of background tasks is hard, and doesn't mention the harder stuff.

Fair, thanks for the feedback :)

It's also annoying to build this stuff on serverless platforms. Love it or hate it, they're here to stay and one of our principles is that we should meet you where you're at — setting this stuff up has always been infra and platform specific; we don't want that to be the case. Developers should be able to write code and have it work everywhere, ideally.

Re: Inngest raises $3M seed to build the reliable workflow platform for every dev

#24

Post by danfarrelly »

radiospiel wrote: post #6

how does inngest compare to temporal?

Hey thanks for the comparison - Temporal is a powerful tool. There are definitely similarities with what Inngest is capable of. Here are a few differences to highlight:

- We’ve taken a different approach that removes the queue and worker abstraction from the end developer and instead uses an HTTP-based invocation. This enables Inngest functions to be run on any platform, including serverless.

- Inngest is powered by events which gives developers the ability to fan out work and build event-driven flows easily.

- Inngest also allows you to coordinate across events, enabling workflows to pause and wait for additional input (step.waitForEvent [1]). This is powerful for human-in-the-middle workflows (e.g. AI confirmation flows) or workflows that pause for days or weeks and conditionally run steps depending on what a user might do in your system (e.g. dynamic email drip campaigns)

- Lastly, events also provide a nice way to easy replay of your workflows across any time window.

- One last thing is that we’ve heard many times that while devs are often quite excited about Temporal, they’ve found Inngest to be much easier to learn and build with. We’ve intentionally worked to make our first SDK with the simplest primitives so their workflows just look like normal code, with minimal DSL.

[1] https://www.inngest.com/docs/reference/functions/step-wait-f...

Re: Inngest raises $3M seed to build the reliable workflow platform for every dev

#25

Post by danfarrelly »

MrUssek wrote: post #9
danfarrelly wrote: post #2

Inngest co-founder here - happy to answer any questions about Inngest or our fundraising!

Just to confirm my understanding; would you consider at least part of your product offering to be similar to temporal.io [1]? Your examples are reminiscent of theirs. [1] https://temporal.io/

Yeah - definitely overlapping use cases! I expanded on more detail above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36698178

Re: Inngest raises $3M seed to build the reliable workflow platform for every dev

#26

Post by darwin67 »

throwawaymaths wrote: post #22
tonyhb wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hah, I get it. We actually have an alpha Go SDK out, and an Elixir SDK in progress. The cool thing is you can switch languages and clouds, deploy a new endpoint, and function state carries over for zero downtime migrations. https://github.com/inngest/inngestgo https://github.com/darwin67/ex-inngest

Just fyi: Neither are critical but I recommend your repo have underscore instead of hyphen for an elixir project, and using "ex" in the name of your project is generally (informally) considered to be a signal for low code quality in the community.

Thanks for the note, it's changed to underscore now. Regarding the "ex" prefix, it's a common pattern for Elixir libraries. https://github.com/h4cc/awesome-elixir

Re: Inngest raises $3M seed to build the reliable workflow platform for every dev

#27

Post by dustingetz »

hobofan wrote: post #10

"every dev" = every JS/TS dev I'm not sure when it started, but I feel like there has been an recent increase of "for every dev" or "for everyone" in marketing copy of tools like these. Though, if you look into it for just a minute it's not a polyglot tool that at the core exposes e.g. a REST API that could be talked to in any language, but a "library + SaaS" for a very specific subset of developers (though not a sma…

seed stage landing pages are for VCs

Re: Inngest raises $3M seed to build the reliable workflow platform for every dev

#28

Post by dismalpedigree »

sv123 wrote: post #20
aliasxneo wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this has been pretty universal, lately. As a primarily Go/Rust/Python developer, it continues to baffles me how these languages continue to be the "default."

.net developer sitting over here in the corner watching all the cool things pass by.

You mean the herd?

Re: Inngest raises $3M seed to build the reliable workflow platform for every dev

#29

Post by obiefernandez »

aliasxneo wrote: post #14
hobofan wrote: post #10

"every dev" = every JS/TS dev I'm not sure when it started, but I feel like there has been an recent increase of "for every dev" or "for everyone" in marketing copy of tools like these. Though, if you look into it for just a minute it's not a polyglot tool that at the core exposes e.g. a REST API that could be talked to in any language, but a "library + SaaS" for a very specific subset of developers (though not a sma…

Yeah, this has been pretty universal, lately. As a primarily Go/Rust/Python developer, it continues to baffles me how these languages continue to be the "default."

Consider this a vote for Ruby!
Post reply on HN