from Hacker News

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

by tonyhb on 9/20/24, 5:33 PM with 51 comments

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 :)

  • by PeterZaitsev on 9/20/24, 7:57 PM

    Looking at the License - This is not Open Source, but rather Source Available software.

    Looks great but do not appreciate deceptive marketing

  • by lmeyerov on 9/20/24, 8:50 PM

    Congrats, definitely an area we're always examining tools

    Afaict, this seems like a more restrictively licensed & less capable alternative to Dagster and Prefect. However, there may be some specific areas it is ahead -- the multitenancy bullet point sounds interesting, for example. Maybe you can share a comparative description?

  • by davekiss on 9/20/24, 11:21 PM

    I implemented Inngest to handle our video migration queues that help move videos off of other platforms into Mux -- complete breeze. Loved the balance between the amount of complexity that's abstracted away, but still enough of a surface API exposed to do some pretty custom domain-specific work. Also the support was top notch, that goes a long way. A++, would use again, genuinely a fan.

  • by tomredman on 9/20/24, 7:48 PM

    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?

  • by ljm on 9/20/24, 7:57 PM

    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.

  • by arez on 9/20/24, 7:36 PM

    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

  • by ykhli on 9/20/24, 9:18 PM

    Congrats! I used Inngest when I wrote a video processing pipeline here https://github.com/tigrisdata-community/multi-modal-starter-...

    Amazing devEx. Thanks so much for all the work and enabling a local mode too

  • by ddmkr_conveo on 9/20/24, 7:40 PM

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

  • by guilhermecgs on 9/20/24, 8:11 PM

    what is the difference from https://temporal.io/

  • by Shakahs on 9/20/24, 11:45 PM

    Restate.dev seems to offer a different implementation of the same feature set, and I think I might like their durable execution syntax more.

  • by darrylcodes on 9/20/24, 9:14 PM

    Congrats this is huge! I've been in the market looking for a tool like this and was curious to know how this compares against toolings such as Temporal (https://temporal.io/product) or Trigger.dev(https://trigger.dev/) ?

  • by giovannibonetti on 9/21/24, 1:08 AM

    I've been looking into this space since I learned about Temporal recently, and I wonder if it would be better to have this integrated in my application, as a library, instead of an external dependency. This way, all the state would be in the same DB.

  • by throwaway743950 on 9/20/24, 10:32 PM

    What are open source alternatives to this? Can temporal.io do the same things?

  • by anthonygrove on 9/20/24, 7:58 PM

    Congrats on 1.0 -- we've been using inngest in our product quite a bit and it's been reliable with a generous free-tier that allows us to leech off staying serverless forever :)

  • by sumukh1 on 9/20/24, 8:31 PM

    This looks great. Do you have an ETA for a Ruby SDK?

  • by jedberg on 9/20/24, 9:11 PM

    Congrats on the launch! Can’t wait to see what you guys launch next week.

  • by tomredman on 9/20/24, 7:50 PM

    Are there plans beyond workflow? (For context I enjoy Inngest already :)

  • by SquidJack on 9/21/24, 3:38 PM

    Whats the difference comparing trigger.dev

  • by Xiol32 on 9/20/24, 7:59 PM

    No option to self-host?