I thought it'd offer programmatic access to Airplanes.<p>Congrats to the Airplane.dev team, even though the product has nothing to do with airplanes :)<p><i>"Ok, then what is it?" you ask</i><p>> Developer infrastructure for internal tools. Airplane is a developer-centric approach to building internal UIs and workflows.
I wonder how they picked the name, probably drawing random words from a bucket. We've gone from solidly exact names to vaguely descriptive ones, then to completely unrelated and now apparently to actively misleading.
We're Airplane customers, after evaluating Windmill and trying some AWS feature that might be similar but was too hard to configure. We had two focuses when choosing Airplane and they've been met so far thanks to both their good product and to their amazing team who were responsive & understanding to changing things to make our requirements work.<p>1. Super easy to use actions & internal UIs, that allow end-users to run things without following Confluence rituals/SOPs. So many things that used to be "ask an engineer to do this when they have time" are now just buttons or interactive screens. But engineering still has control: anything that can can an incident or that is hard to reverse, Airplane automated the approval workflow so that a qualified person can approve it - whether it's a task or a button in an internal UI. Also, several scheduled runbooks/workflows that we could have set up a system to run - but why do that (+ maintain it forever) if it takes 20 minutes to configure in Airplane?<p>2. Cannot introduce more risk than it reduced (because we _did_ have risk from people doing these things by following written procedures). Everything gets logged, critical things are reported as Datadog events + Slack messages, our tasks and UIs exist in multiple environments (and go through source control) so we can test them like real software. All tasks run on _our_ infrastructure, using our IAM roles (which we've worked with Airplane to get to their minimal form, where they can't touch anything non-Airplane'y - and they changed the default installation to match, so if you start using Airplane you'll benefit from that too) and security groups (which reach dedicated load balancer listeners that can validate the requests). We have set permissions to be as strict as Airplane allows, connected to Google Workspace user groups (and so audited regularly).<p>Obviously whenever doing Build vs Buy: we could have built this. We could have also soldered our servers' circuitry on our own. But if someone needs something quick to automate their work, it takes less than an hour to set it up from scratch now and it's all straightforward.
Congrats on the series B and very interesting approach with the Views.<p>Developer tools, especially ones around code should be open-source. If you like the idea of productionizing one-off scripts, building flows, and managing secrets and schedules in an integrated platform, we have made the same observation as the Airplane team but in a fully open-source manner: [1]. Being open-source in this space offers a lot of synergies, you can for instance build a community around sharing the modules that compose your flows: [2]<p>In addition, if your primary languages are Typescript, Python or Go, we offer a more integrated experience by parsing the script parameters directly to generate the input spec and the frontend. We are developing our own UI builder as well, more to be announced in the next month. We just released our helm-charts for easier self-hosted deployments: [4]<p>You can also try it for free at [5]<p>[1]: <a href="https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://hub.windmill.dev" rel="nofollow">https://hub.windmill.dev</a><p>[3]: <a href="https://windmill.dev" rel="nofollow">https://windmill.dev</a><p>[4]: <a href="https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill-helm-charts" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill-helm-charts</a><p>[5]: <a href="https://app.windmill.dev" rel="nofollow">https://app.windmill.dev</a>
You get five seconds to make me look longer. Took me forever to sort of understand what airplane is, after getting over the cognitive hurdle of figuring out that this is not about aviation....at all.
joshma, should I use Airplane instead of creating cronjobs? I first heard about airplane the other day when I was googling alternatives to cron, or cron GUIs.