windmill VS oban

Data Handling: Utilizes Windmill for data pipelines, with a primary database powered by PostgreSQL. Auxiliary data storage is handled by MongoDB, with Redis for caching to optimize performance

Look very similar to the script builder portion of https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill, but not open-source, not self-hostable, and without open-source integrations (https://hub.windmill.dev/)

disclaimer: I'm founder of ^

If you need a job queue on Postgres, https://windmill.dev provide an all-integrated developer platform with a Pg queue at its core that support jobs defined in python/typescript/sql

windmill.dev - Windmill is an open-source developer platform to quickly build production-grade multi-step automation and internal apps from minimal Python and Typescript scripts. As a free user, you can create and be a member of at most three non-premium workspaces.

For an alternative to airplane.dev, you can checkout Windmill.

https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill

"Open-source developer infrastructure for internal tools (APIs, background jobs, workflows and UIs). Self-hostable alternative to Airplane, Pipedream, Superblocks and a simplified Temporal with autogenerated UIsm and custom UIs to trigger workflows and scripts as internal apps.

Scripts are turned into sharable UIs automatically, and can be composed together into flows or used into richer apps built with low-code. Supported script languages supported are: Python, TypeScript, Go, Bash, SQL, and GraphQL. "

If you search HN, you'll find the creator of Windmill comment on comparisons to airplane.dev:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

https://windmill.dev is a self-hostable OSS alternative to pipedream

(disclaimer: I'm founder)

I'm genuinely curious what server-side stuff on BC you are referring to. That may have been something added after our assessment. The way I'd generally approach something like that for any of the platforms would be using an external low/no code solution to process webhook data. But it would depend heavily on the use case. For a more developer friendly option I've been really impressed by windmill.dev. We use a mix of n8n and windmill for various needs.

Yes it goes in that direction, however note that you can already do this in a not too hard way.

Our openflow spec is both open-source and has a full openapi definition: https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill/blob/main/openflow...

you can use that to generate client sdks in any languages and build your own dag with it. That's what one of our customer did building a reactflow to openflow library: https://github.com/Devessier/reactflow-to-windmill

It's not as good as the decorator way but we move fast and if you still have interest for it we could prioritize it (and ask for feedbacks :))

Oban, backed by PostgreSQL or SQLite, also provides a queue-based job processing system. Exq, on the other hand, is backed by Redis. It provides features similar to Flume, but without built-in rate limiting and batch processing capabilities.

In Elixir land Oban[0] uses Postgres as queue and seems to work quite well.

[0] - https://github.com/sorentwo/oban

I hear you on that, and can say that Postgres is incredibly capable at going beyond typical relational database workloads. One example are durable queues that are transactionally consistent with the rest of the database play a unique role in our architecture that would otherwise require more ceremony. More details here: https://getoban.pro

We are also working on shifting some workloads off of Postgres on to more appropriate systems as we scale, like logging. But we intentionally chose to minimize dependencies by pushing Postgres further to move faster, with migration plans ready as we continue to reach new levels of scale (e.g. using a dedicated log storage solution like elastic search or clickhouse).

You can actually have "background jobs" in very different ways in Elixir.

> I want background work to live on different compute capacity than http requests, both because they have very different resources usage

In Elixir, because of the way the BEAM works (the unit of parallelism is much cheaper and consume a low amount of memory), "incoming http requests" and related "workers" are not as expensive (a lot less actually) compared to other stacks (for instance Ruby and Python), where it is quite critical to release "http workers" and not hold the connection (which is what lead to the creation of background job tools like Resque, DelayedJob, Sidekiq, Celery...).

This means that you can actually hold incoming HTTP connections a lot longer without troubles.

A consequence of this is that implementing "reverse proxies", or anything calling third party servers _right in the middle_ of your own HTTP call, is usually perfectly acceptable (something I've done more than a couple of times, the latest one powering the reverse proxy behind https://transport.data.gouv.fr - code available at https://github.com/etalab/transport-site/tree/master/apps/un...).

As a consequence, what would be a bad pattern in Python or Ruby (holding the incoming HTTP connection) is not a problem with Elixir.

> because I want to have state or queues in front of background work so there's a well-defined process for retry, error handling, and back-pressure.

Unless you deal with immediate stuff like reverse proxying or cheap "one off async tasks" (like recording a metric), there also are solutions to have more "stateful" background works in Elixir, too.

A popular background job queue is https://github.com/sorentwo/oban (roughly similar to Sidekiq at al), which uses Postgres.

It handles retries, errors etc.

But it's not the only solution, as you have other tools dedicated to processing, such as Broadway (https://github.com/dashbitco/broadway), which handles back-pressure, fault-tolerance, batching etc natively.

You also have more simple options, such as flow (https://github.com/dashbitco/flow), gen_stage (https://github.com/elixir-lang/gen_stage), Task.async_stream (https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/1.12/Task.html#async_stream/5) etc.

It allows to use the "right tool for the job" quite easily.

It is also interesting to note there is no need to "go evented" if you need to fetch data from multiple HTTP servers: it can happen in the exact same process (even: in a background task attached to your HTTP server), as done here https://transport.data.gouv.fr/explore (if you zoom you will see vehicle moving in realtime, and ~80 data sources are being polled every 10 seconds & broadcasted to the visitors via pubsub & websockets).

Hi HN!

This is something I've been tinkering on for the past couple months. It's basically just an API/CLI for scheduling delayed or recurring jobs as HTTP requests.

I initially built it as a personal tool to save myself a bit of time on little side projects where I've needed scheduled/recurring alerts, but decided it could be a good opportunity to practice building out a nice landing page [0] and documentation [1]. And who knows, maybe someone else will find it useful ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The tool relies heavily on Elixir's Oban [2] library for managing jobs, and Mintlify [3] for documentation. I also shamelessly stole most of the frontend design from Resend [4] because I'm a fan of the aesthetic and thought it would be good for my design chops to use their design as a guide. I also discovered Radix [5] UI while working on this, which ended up being immensely helpful for moving quickly on the frontend.

Anyways, I almost certainly spent a bit too much time on small UX details that are most likely utterly inconsequential, but it was a fun exercise in polish :)

All feedback is welcome!

[0] https://www.booper.dev/

[1] https://docs.booper.dev/

[2] https://github.com/sorentwo/oban

[3] https://mintlify.com/

[4] https://resend.com/

[5] https://www.radix-ui.com/

Idk about pgagent but any table is a resilient queue with the multiple locks available in pg along with some SELECT pg_advisory_lock or SELECT FOR UPDATE queries, and/or LISTEN/NOTIFY.

Several bg job libs are built around native locking functionality

> Relies upon Postgres integrity, session-level Advisory Locks to provide run-once safety and stay within the limits of schema.rb, and LISTEN/NOTIFY to reduce queuing latency.

https://github.com/bensheldon/good_job

> |> lock("FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED")

https://github.com/sorentwo/oban/blob/8acfe4dcfb3e55bbf233aa...

> Bad code in a specific part of the codebase bringing down the whole app, as in our November incident.

This is a non-issue if you're using a Elixir/Erlang monolith given its fault tolerant nature.

The noisy neighbour issue (resource hogging) is still something you need to manage though. If you use something like Oban[1] (for background job queues and cron jobs), you can set both local and global limits. Local being the current node, and global the cluster.

Operating in a shared cluster (vs split workload deployments) give you the benefit of being much more efficient with your hardware. I've heard many stories of massive infra savings due to moving to an Elixir/Erlang system.

1. https://github.com/sorentwo/oban