[HN Gopher] Show HN: Free hosted open-source alternative to Zapi...
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Show HN: Free hosted open-source alternative to Zapier/Airflow
Author : newcrobuzon
Score : 234 points
Date : 2020-09-08 12:26 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (cloud.titanoboa.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (cloud.titanoboa.io)
| j45 wrote:
| Being a JVM friendly tool, it would be great to unlock other JVM
| syntaxes to allow scripting in any lanugage.. Jython for Python,
| Quercus for PHP, JRuby for Ruby, etc.
| newcrobuzon wrote:
| yes, I am considering this and it should not be _that_ hard
| (also Kotlin, Nashorn javascript...), but at this stage
| Titanoboa is just a one-man-show - so patience, I might get
| there ;)
| j45 wrote:
| For sure. Being a one man army has it's perks and challenges.
| I hope this project has a community form around it.
|
| The JVM is more underrated/unknown than it should be in the
| startup space, tools like what you're making make it far more
| accessible.
| ramon wrote:
| newcrobuzon you're a genius my friend someone should give you
| an award I loved your idea and how you approached it it's
| fantastic for developers. I'm a root Java dev and I have to
| say you did fantastic work to make developers life easier,
| you didn't take any approach you made your own this is
| awesome. If you get Javascript working I feel like I'm
| getting back into AppJet days! This is fantastic stuff. If
| you show me how I can help get the javascript stuff going I
| would be glad to help you in this initative since I have
| adopted NodeJS recently like you said, being a one man army
| you have to be efficient and JS makes me more efficient.
| mdaniel wrote:
| FWIW, I would have to check all the ones listed but if
| they're sane scripting languages on the jvm then they'll
| implement the JSR-223 interface allowing one to pick them at
| runtime without a huge amount of drama: https://jcp.org/about
| Java/communityprocess/final/jsr223/inde...
| ramon wrote:
| I liked the video demo really nice and I would say this should be
| called not low-code or no-code but rather aPaaS which is
| Application Platform as a Service.
|
| So the title should be "Host your own aPaaS" instead.
| PascalW wrote:
| Nice 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/
| lulzx wrote:
| It's license (fair code) sucks.
| j1elo wrote:
| Why exactly? I myself have been researching the options that
| exist to write open source software but at the same time
| prevent industrial leeches from benefiting from it (aka.
| avoiding Amazon playing an Elasticsearch move EDIT - or was
| it Mongo?).
|
| So far I've stumbled upon using dual AGPL + commercial for
| those who don't like the copyleft; using something like
| Mongo's SSPL; MariaDB's BSL; and now, Commons Clause.
|
| On the surface (I didn't yet study carefully the intricacies
| of all options) all these look to me as a great way to
| publish code and contribute to the whole of our common
| knowledge, while at the same time being able to maybe make a
| living from it, something for which it's important to prevent
| some bad actors from bundling it and profiting from it on
| your behalf. Otherwise that code wouldn't really exist at all
| to start with...
|
| I might write an Ask HN becaude this topic is complex.
| newcrobuzon wrote:
| 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).
| [deleted]
| cstuder wrote:
| You misunderstood, it's not you who's being criticized.
|
| n8n used to write "open source" on their webpage while
| publishing the product with a proprietary license. A lot of
| discussions ensued.
|
| https://github.com/n8n-io/n8n/issues/40
| newcrobuzon wrote:
| Oh really? Wasn't aware of that. Thanks for the link!
| newcrobuzon wrote:
| A bit similar, but on JVM. The main focus of Titanoboa is
| however as follows:
|
| - make rapid prototyping of new steps possible during runtime,
| without any need to restart/redeploy
|
| - focus on distributed processing, where in master-less
| Titanoboa cluster you can have pretty much any number of nodes
| jchook wrote:
| @newcrobuzon you have some kind of comment string output at the
| top of your html body tag. Looks like something you do not want
| exposed.
|
| Congratulations on reaching public beta and for submitting to HN!
| Looks very promising!
| newcrobuzon wrote:
| Thanks! If it is the recapcha string then it is just an old
| public string for local testing.
|
| But I would upvote you 100x or send you a medal or something if
| I could, this is really super nice of you letting me know!
| ForHackernews wrote:
| How does this compare to Prefect? https://medium.com/the-prefect-
| blog/why-not-airflow-4cfa4232...
| newcrobuzon wrote:
| To be honest Prefect just got on my radar last week, so I will
| need to look at it more closely, I was not aware of them till
| then.
|
| Obviously this is for JVM, plus I am not sure how Prefect
| addresses following two points I mainly focus on:
|
| - make rapid prototyping of new steps possible during runtime,
| without any need to restart/redeploy
|
| - focus on distributed processing, where in master-less
| Titanoboa cluster you can have pretty much any number of nodes
| ramon wrote:
| Prefect is like an hour just to put up the kubernetes
| environment required for it. The way you have it you can just
| do a simple docker run and start coding this is the
| comparison and you're coding on the web no need to steup
| VSCode or nothing it's fast.
| bambam24 wrote:
| I stop watching it when he said "here I can add any Maven
| dependency"
| newcrobuzon wrote:
| Well yes, this is for JVM, so maven ecosystem, sorry.
|
| I have been contemplating also doing a clone on node.js
| (titanoboa is written in clojure so it would just be a move
| from clojure to clojurescript), but I did hear that the npm
| ecosystem is a bit uninviting too...
|
| What dependencies tools would you like to see?
| sixhobbits wrote:
| I've used Zapier a fair amount and I wrote an article about
| Airflow so I have a fairly good understanding of that too.
|
| I would never really consider them alternatives though? To me
| Zapier is a low/no code tool that offers a bazillion integrations
| and Airflow is a workflow orchestration tool.
|
| So comparing to both of them confuses me and I guess choosing one
| would give you a more nieche audience but one that you can
| connect better to as well.
| mrweasel wrote:
| There's also a problem with describing your product as "an
| alternative to". I don't know what Zapier and Airflow is, but
| now I want to find out, which pushes me towards the
| competition, rather than just explaining what your product does
| and have me view the competition as the alternative.
| newcrobuzon wrote:
| This is a very good point.
|
| My current line of thinking is: _A workflow is a workflow is a
| workflow_. Titanoboa is built the way that pretty much
| everything it shuffles is data - and either it can be big
| (Airflow) or the steps can have side effects (iPaaS /Zapier).
|
| The "no code" is achievable since adding more predefined steps
| is not that hard (there's not that many at the moment though) -
| see for instance
| https://github.com/mikub/titanoboa/wiki/Getting-Started-with...
| - you dont code, you just fill in properties, so it is very
| straightforward, pretty much like Zappier.
|
| My aim in the iPaaS space is more at the enterprise level,
| where the predefined steps won't do anymore and you have to
| custom develop them anyway - so in that are I think Titanoboa
| shines since you really can rapidly prototype steps on the fly,
| a bit like Repl.it and Zapier together...
|
| I agree that it might be good to pick one audience, at this
| stage I am just experimenting if somehow I can market to both
| and don't mess up and confuse both groups.
| j45 wrote:
| Keep converging and building.
|
| I have been experimenting with combinations of huggin,
| camunda, airflow and others to try and achieve an integrated
| workflow/state/process management.
|
| There exists a gap in the enterprise space between all these
| tools.. and it has been further exacerbated by the disruption
| introduced to many industries by covid. There is a real
| opportunity for small and medium businesses to be able to
| access tooling that is beyond what a base line Zap, etc can
| accomplish.
|
| Would be happy to connect offline.
| newcrobuzon wrote:
| Thanks! Will reach out when the traffic subsides :) Or feel
| free to shoot me an email, my email address is on the web
| page.
| lewisjoe wrote:
| 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 these systems who call themselves as workflow
| engines - is to provide a structure to an otherwise ad-hoc
| movement of entities so that a lead/manager is able to ensure a
| process and collect statistics.
|
| 2. Automations
|
| For example "apple workflow" app or Zapier or Zoho Flow. These
| softwares define a sequence of steps that are triggered when an
| event occurs in the system.
|
| The motive of these systems are to enable automation and
| integrations between different software components with zero
| code (thus, no-code).
|
| 3. Process Designers (Bad term but can't think of anything
| better at the moment)
|
| For example Airflow/Camunda. These systems are not necessarily
| low-code but they mostly deal with arranging individual
| components of code such that a process can be assembled as
| quickly as possible. These systems usually are accompanied by a
| visual designer like what Zapier has, but the intentions are
| mostly to ease out the process, than being a complete no-code
| tool to create automations. However, their marketing tries to
| sell themselves as no-code platform for business folks.
|
| The motive is not yet very clear to me but from my initial
| intuition they can be used to initiate some data-processing
| pipeline, I guess? If anybody can throw more clarity, please
| leave a reply.
|
| Now as you can see, much like how a "Process" can mean many
| things in many different context, the term "Workflow" can mean
| a lot depending on the context. Any software that calls itself
| the ultimate workflow solution is just a lie. It's like calling
| something an "ultimate process engine" - doesn't make sense.
| zacwest wrote:
| I'd like you to listen to this file, which is your first
| 'headline' read by `say`:
| https://www.dropbox.com/s/fanpqs8lv2d9nvl/say.m4a?dl=0 Now
| imagine yourself in the shoes of a vision-impaired person
| relying on a technology like VoiceOver. Do you understand how
| unbelievably frustrating that is?
| lewisjoe wrote:
| Thanks for pointing this out. Never knew this would break
| screen readers. Sorry. I'm changing the font right now.
| samstave wrote:
| > __ _Now imagine yourself in the shoes of a vision-
| impaired person relying on a technology like VoiceOver_ __
|
| ---
|
| Yeah - thats "frustrating" for like what, 'dozens'? As
| opposed to just the other problems in the world that dwarf
| this?
|
| Now imagine you are a % of the population of the globe who
| actually requires this to be a thought.
|
| Yeah - personally, i see this as a statistical straw-man.
|
| Sure, why dont you imagine yourself as a gay queer trans
| java programmer from ohio that moved to silicon valley for
| more acceptance and is going to try to make it in FAANG
| based on the fact that youre gay queer trans as opposed to
| say, your ability and then blame people on the hostility of
| the environment to you because you choose to only wear
| naturally harvested wool and eat kale.
|
| Yeah, nobody gives a shit.
|
| Either be a good person and do good work, or GTFO - nobody
| really cares about anything else.
| Grimm1 wrote:
| "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 think Airflow belongs in that
| category or rather, and maybe more accurately, no/low code is
| not really a major defining quality of the bucket you're
| calling "Process Designers".
|
| I've also been calling them "Process Schedulers" because
| typically it involves translating a more manual, but well
| defined process into it's automated phase.
| newcrobuzon wrote:
| 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...
| neeleshs wrote:
| This is not true in many use cases. There are tons of
| ways to handle low code/no code. It is a very hard
| problem to solve, and vendors end up building basic "low-
| code" wrappers around API endpoints, and that's why it
| looks like a lost cause.
|
| Done right, (we are a living proof it can be done, at
| Syncari), one can do a lot of stuff done without any
| coding
| newcrobuzon wrote:
| Do you have any links to some blog posts discussing it
| (the "doing it right" approach)? I would agree that it
| definitely depends on the use case.
|
| I will definitely check out Syncari - just opened the
| landing page and it looks great!
| neeleshs wrote:
| Thanks! Haven't had a chance to write a lot about this
| (heads down building and selling), but
| https://syncari.com/a-brief-history-of-todays-data-woes-
| and-... touches on it a bit.
|
| For us, it is about:
|
| * implementing deep integrations that are commonplace
|
| * not spraying too thin in the quest of supporting
| hundreds of systems
|
| * thinking from a data model/data/eventually consistent
| system perspective
|
| * completely dropping the reactive/trigger based/if-this-
| then-that point-to-point model.
| mfateev wrote:
| Which bucket temporal.io and Azure Durable Functions that
| support `workflow as code` do fall into?
| itpragmatik wrote:
| How does it compare with Cadence/Temporal?
| thrownaway954 wrote:
| that is the crappiest website i've seen in quite sometime. my
| first impression was that this is either a scam or a joke. in
| this day and age, if you are can't afford a decently designed
| site, how am i ever even going to give your product a chance.
| caymanjim wrote:
| First impression: rename it now while the cost is low. The name
| is unwieldy.
| everfree wrote:
| Ti-ta-no-bo-a
|
| 5 syllables.
|
| Agreed that this is unwieldy to say in normal speech.
| newcrobuzon wrote:
| 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 :)
| dddw wrote:
| Gdoc form for suggestions. 1 mail to all users (small
| enticement, reward for winner, pro account for life or
| something else really nice). Remove any lewd suggestions.
| Then pick one you love, or if you can't choose a poll.
| afarviral wrote:
| "Dinornis" or "Moa" in maori.
| StavrosK wrote:
| If you're going with the former, you might as well spell
| it "deinornis", it looks cooler and is more correct.
| acidbaseextract wrote:
| Titano is nice, but may have some trademark issues. Tanobo
| is easy to say, if a bit generic. Just playing with
| syllables.
| ohyeshedid wrote:
| A fauna focused synonym for canopy?
| newcrobuzon wrote:
| Hi HN peeps! I single-handedly built Titanoboa (a workflow
| automation for JVM) and now I am experimenting with hosting
| dockerized Titanoboa instances - so I built a free hosting
| service. If you want to play with Titanoboa in your browser
| without installing anything, give it a try.
|
| Feel free to check out Titanoboa on Github:
| https://github.com/mikub/titanoboa
|
| Also: This is an early beta so please do let me know if something
| breaks or you spot a bug. Atm I have load-balancers set up only
| on West coast and in Europe, so apologies to folks from down
| under & similar locations, let me know if it's too laggy :)
| cateye wrote:
| Why do you describe it as "automation for JVM" instead of
| "automation that runs on JVM"?
| newcrobuzon wrote:
| Good point, not a native speaker so I thought this would
| roughly mean the same.
|
| The main message I wanted to convey was that this runs on JVM
| and multiple JVM languages (java and clojure) could be used.
| prabhatjha wrote:
| Nicely 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
| juliend2 wrote:
| Very interesting! What library did you use for the SVG powered
| diagram tool?
| juliend2 wrote:
| I think this blog post answers my question:
| https://titanoboa.io/visualizing-workflows.html
|
| Very cool to see how you use clojurescript for this.
| newcrobuzon wrote:
| I am using D3. AFAIK nobody has used it for worfklow
| visualization so far: https://www.titanoboa.io/visualizing-
| workflows.html
| X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
| Luigi does some workflow visualization with d3
|
| https://luigi.readthedocs.io/en/stable/index.html
| newcrobuzon wrote:
| Thanks, wasn't aware of them!
| [deleted]
| WrtCdEvrydy wrote:
| Honestly I really like this, I can't wait to use it, but my
| concerns are around certain features being behind a paywall,
| especially HA and Clustering on the self-hosted version.
|
| I understand that the cloud hosted version should cost more for
| these features but without a way to get pricing for the self-
| hosted HA and clustered version it will be a tough sell for me to
| deploy it, use it and have to scrap it in the future.
| newcrobuzon wrote:
| Wow, this has blown up a bit, so I have added few more servers
| (now two servers on the West coast and two in Europe), but
| ultimately I think there is a limit cap of 100 Titanoboa
| instances in each geography in parallel.
|
| So if we break that level please don't be mad if you don't get
| your instance :)
|
| Instead give me a star on github and come back later :)
|
| Cheers Miro
| MiroF wrote:
| Wishing you success, fellow Miro.
| newcrobuzon wrote:
| 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 how well the service holds so far under the
| load.
| newcrobuzon wrote:
| Approaching 100 containers cap in US, so if something does
| not work, dont be mad :)
| newcrobuzon wrote:
| 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).
| erulabs wrote:
| Heya - just a note that I build these kinds of PaaS
| platforms for a living - if you need a hand building a
| super-massive cluster for lots of users, let me know!
| foolinaround wrote:
| is there some recipes or some common scenarios one can 'import'
| in to check it out?
| newcrobuzon wrote:
| You can check out https://github.com/mikub/titanoboa-tasklets
| And also https://github.com/mikub/titanoboa-sample-workflows
|
| There are few blog posts I wrote about some sample workflows,
| e.g.:
|
| https://github.com/mikub/titanoboa/wiki/Getting-Started-with...
|
| https://www.titanoboa.io/using-titanoboa-for-it-automation.h...
|
| https://www.titanoboa.io/using-titanoboa-for-cloud-integrati...
|
| https://www.titanoboa.io/java-repl.html
| kevsim wrote:
| Impressive feat of engineering for one person!
|
| But is it really an alternative to Zapier? I mean, while Zapier
| is obviously about automation, it always felt that their big
| selling point was the sheer number of integrations they provide.
| newcrobuzon wrote:
| My aim is to make this easier to customize - i.e. develop
| custom steps on the run and have an instant feedback loop as
| you develop or customize existing integrations.
|
| Target audience might be slightly different ultimately, but
| we'll see - I would envision this to be more useful in an
| enterprise environment where you pretty much always have to
| customize the integrations that were provided out of the box.
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(page generated 2020-09-08 23:00 UTC)