June 2022 Summaries

Message queues and message brokers are both used for event handling in complex systems or at scale. While they have similar interfaces, their differences lie in delivery guarantees, scheduling, and coupling. Queues typically provide an ordered series of events with a 1-to-1 relationship between messages and workers, while message brokers allow multiple services to subscribe to a topic and offer different delivery guarantees. Both systems can be used together for handling delayed jobs, background jobs, and asynchronous functions in growing complexities.

Inngest has developed an event-driven queueing platform for modern development that is serverless. The company built this platform to improve the developer experience by making functions declarative, enabling complex logic, and offering multi-language support without requiring SDKs or frameworks. The system uses events as its primary contract between dispatching work on a queue and performing the work, allowing for indirection and decoupling of callsite, specific queue, and function. By embracing event-driven design, Inngest aims to create an easy-to-learn and use platform that can be locally tested and deployed with minimal effort. The company has open-sourced various components of the system and encourages feedback from users.

Inngest has introduced a new platform called Inngest DevServer to simplify writing async app logic. The event-driven queue for any language allows developers to write delayed or background jobs by triggering serverless functions from events, decoupling application code from the queue. With the release of Inngest DevServer, users can run one command locally (inngest dev) to run a local, in-memory copy of Inngest without having to worry about setting up queuing infrastructure or workers again. The DevServer is an open-source tool that runs a dead simple API for sending events and executes functions with the event payload. It also captures function responses and event payloads in its log output.

The text discusses the challenges faced by developers while working with background jobs in complex systems. It mentions that there are two typical options for handling background jobs - using a job system or building it yourself using a message broker, both of which require significant configuration and maintenance efforts. The author then introduces Inngest, an open-source project aimed at improving the developer experience while working with background jobs. They plan to extract core components from Inngest's platform and embed them in their CLI as the new Inngest DevServer. The text also outlines the problems that Inngest is designed to solve, such as boilerplate code, configuration management, vendor lock-in, and deciding where to run the code. It further explains the approach taken by Inngest, which includes simplified message or event publishing, platform agnosticism, serverless consumers, runtime agnosticism, and support for step functions. The author also discusses the benefits of building Inngest in the open, such as allowing developers to self-host and benefit from community contributions. Finally, they share their roadmap and invite developers to contribute to the project by joining their Discord server.