November 2022 Summaries

The Inngest SDK has added official support for RedwoodJS, a full-stack JavaScript/TypeScript web application framework built on React, GraphQL, and Prisma. This integration allows developers to use Inngest's event-driven infrastructure to trigger Serverless Functions in their Redwood applications as background jobs or scheduled tasks. By pairing Redwood with Inngest, developers can deploy serverless functions without worrying about running and maintaining a separate service for handling background jobs.

The article discusses the importance of building reliable workflows with events in applications. As tasks become more complex, they can be split into multiple independent steps or phases, often referred to as "workflows" or step functions. Developers need confidence that their critical workflows are running consistently, reliably, and durably. Workflow orchestration frameworks can help manage these complex tasks with significant learning curves. The article presents an approach where developers write complex jobs combining multiple steps right in code while minimizing custom DSL and concepts to learn. This approach provides a simple way to run the workflows from local development to production, ensuring transparency, portability, and potential for self-hosting.

The Jamstack has evolved from a simple concept for building front-ends into an entire ecosystem and approach to developing applications. It encompasses JavaScript frameworks, serverless APIs/FaaS, and serverless databases and services. While the Jamstack has seen significant innovation across the stack, there are still areas that need improvement, particularly in asynchronous work. Inngest is a platform designed to address these gaps by providing event-driven functionality for running any sort of asynchronous workloads driven by event data. It aims to be developer-first and offers automatic scaling, great defaults, power as needed, and the ability to combine functionality for complex workflows.