Show HN: Inngest – Developer platform for background jobs and workflows (opens in new tab)

Being HTTP based (push vs. pull), it's easier to manage and works natively with serverless and servers.

Inngest is also event-driven, so you can fan-out and do things like have your workflow wait for another event. Our `step.waitForEvent()` allows you to pause a function until another event is received, creating dynamic jobs that can wait for additional actions or input. Also, using events allows us to replay failures super easily.

re: ActiveJob - Yeah, multi-step workflows are a huge difference. We manage step retries and the function state for you. That makes things like sleep and coordinating between events easy. As you mentioned, it leads to simpler function definition so it means that almost any engineer can write workflows quickly and easily read the code in a single place, reducing bugs due to disconnected jobs.

Thanks! What type of monitoring were you looking for? We have some basic metrics now, but know we need to improve this. What metrics, alerting, observability are important for you?

*Caveat*: This is super nuanced and hotly debated, so this is high level and no perfect answer here.

Mid term, we plan to move from SSPL to a more open license in the future as we further develop our open source project.

Over the last year we've been iterating on the internals a lot to build things like:

- Concurrency (shared nothing, auto-scalable)

- Batching (have one fn run with 100 events, vs 1:1 mapping)

- Prioritization

- Replay

- Parallelization

- Branch deploys

- Rate limiting

The changes have been heavy, and it would be really hard for self-hosted people to handle the migrations necessary for these. Now that this is slowing, self hosting is realistically something that's possible soon. We'd prefer to offer self hosting when it's easy and ready, vs something that's a burden to operate.

A lot of folks in the TS/JS community also don't often build distributed systems and it's easy to get wrong. So we think they're hungry for something like Inngest that they don't need to manage or spend weeks learning some complex system. Plus, TS gives us typing for all events/messages.

We already have a working Go SDK that we use internally and we have a test harness that will enable us to add other languages like Rust or Zig more easily. We even have a community member building a PoC for Elixir.