March 2023 Summaries

The article discusses how developers can run long-running background functions on Vercel, a serverless platform. Traditionally, serverless functions are used for synchronous APIs but when critical business logic needs to be executed that requires longer timeouts than the usual short ones provided by platforms like Vercel (10 to 60 seconds), developers have to make choices. One option is to move these jobs to another infrastructure provider such as AWS Lambda, but this comes with trade-offs including more overhead and complexity. The article suggests two solutions: finding a way to run longer functions or breaking the functions into smaller, coordinated ones that can run independently. It recommends breaking up long-running jobs into individually retried steps and utilizing something that orchestrates each of these steps, including persisting the output across multiple steps and retrying each step when failures occur. Inngest is a platform designed to handle complex workloads comprised of any number of steps. It does not host your code; instead, it remotely and securely invokes your functions via HTTP. Your code all runs on Vercel or whatever platform you're using. Inngest has several handlers including Next.js, Remix, Nuxt, RedwoodJS, amongst others. The article provides an example of how to use the Inngest SDK for long-running functions and explains how to deploy these functions using Vercel integration. It also mentions other cool things that can be done with the Inngest SDK such as running steps in parallel, putting the function to sleep, and scheduling work in the future.

The article discusses how to import thousands of items from e-commerce APIs in seconds using serverless functions. It highlights the challenges faced while importing such large amounts of data, including synchronous execution being slow, third party API rate limiting and reliability issues, and long jobs being prone to failure. To address these challenges, it introduces Inngest, a platform that enables developers to mitigate them right in their existing codebase. The article provides an example of how to use the Inngest SDK to create a function for importing products from Shopify API and demonstrates how to break long running functions into steps with automatic retries for each step. It also explains how to use fan-out for faster parallel processing by sending events from one function to another. The article concludes by emphasizing the benefits of using Inngest, such as its framework support, serverless backends compatibility, and built-in debugging tools.