January 2024 Summaries

Inngest has secured $6.1 million in funding led by a16z (Andreessen Horowitz), with additional investment from GGV, Afore Capital, and Guillermo Rauch. The company aims to simplify the development of reliable applications by providing a reliability layer for modern apps. Inngest enables developers to add durable execution, flow control, and events to any application without managing infrastructure or writing boilerplate code. With this new funding, Inngest plans to invest in enhancing its product offerings and expanding its team.

During Launch Week, Inngest released numerous features to improve its developer experience (DX), including Replay for incident recovery, bulk cancellation API, cross-language support with Python and Go SDKs, zero-downtime cloud migrations, and enhanced error handling in SDKs. Additionally, partnerships were launched with Clerk for easier authentication workflows and Svix to simplify Inngest integrations for webhook providers. The response from the community was positive, with interest on various platforms and a top spot on Hacker News. Upcoming announcements and releases are planned, and feedback is welcome through their public roadmap and Discord server.

Inngest has introduced a new Edge Event API as a closed beta to improve latency for applications running on distributed compute like Vercel Edge or Cloudflare Workers. The goal is to achieve sub-100ms response times globally by moving the Event API closer to users' servers through regional replication, caching, and payload validation. The new API has already shown significant improvements in reducing response times by up to 85%. Inngest plans to roll out this feature first for sending events via SDKs or HTTP, with more webhook features coming later this year.

Inngest has improved error handling in its SDKs by allowing users to handle failed steps with standard language primitives. This enables more flexibility in error handling while maintaining the automatic retries feature of Inngest functions. Users can now perform rollbacks, create workflows based on errors, and handle rejected inputs without marking the function as "failed." The improved error handling is available in TypeScript (v3.12.0) and Go (v0.6.0) SDKs, with plans to roll it out to Python soon.

Svix, a reliable webhook delivery service, has partnered with Inngest to provide seamless integration for both sending and receiving webhooks. This collaboration aims to simplify the process of managing webhooks by ensuring their reliable delivery through Svix and execution via Inngest. The partnership also offers an easy-to-use transformation template that allows webhook providers to enable their users to set up Inngest accounts quickly. With this integration, developers can create more robust applications by efficiently handling real-time updates from third-party services.

The article discusses how to use Clerk's webhooks in conjunction with Inngest functions. It explains that Clerk's webhooks allow applications to react asynchronously to changes, such as user creation events. By using the new integration between Svix and Inngest, developers can easily connect their Clerk account to Inngest and start receiving all selected Clerk events within their Inngest account. The article highlights several benefits of using Inngest for webhooks, including managing concurrency, fan-out events to multiple functions, creating complex workflows, and delaying tasks. It also provides examples of how to create Inngest functions triggered by Clerk events, such as sending welcome emails or starting trials in Stripe. The author encourages readers to explore the possibilities offered by combining Clerk and Inngest for their applications.

The Inngest system is designed to help developers migrate across clouds or even change programming languages with minimal effort and zero downtime. It achieves this by managing state for long running jobs, enabling functions to be stateless and run on serverless platforms. Inngest executes functions via HTTP wherever the code is hosted, making migrations as simple as updating a URL. The system also supports cross-language migrations by preserving state when rewriting functions in another programming language with the same app ID and function IDs. This feature provides flexibility for teams to optimize their cloud spend or performance without significant overhead.

The article discusses the release of new SDKs by Inngest that support Python and Go languages. These SDKs aim to provide a language-agnostic way for developers to create fault-tolerant, long-running functions with built-in flow control. The state management is decoupled from the application using these SDKs, making them lightweight and easier to use in multi-language systems. Inngest also added step.invoke() to allow calling of Inngest functions directly from within other Inngest functions, further enhancing its cross-language support. The article concludes by stating that this is just the beginning of their journey towards becoming fully language-agnostic and invites feedback and suggestions for future enhancements.

Inngest has introduced Replay, a tool designed to simplify recovery from incidents in production systems. The platform combines event streams and queues with durable execution, enabling developers to search for events hours, days, or weeks in the past. With Replay, users can easily re-queue failed jobs and execute code on their own infrastructure without needing scripts. This feature is available across all Inngest plans, including the free tier. The company aims to expand Replay's capabilities further by introducing event-replay for even more efficient system recovery in the future.

The article discusses the challenges faced while building a fair multi-tenant queuing system. It explains how they built Inngest as a reliability layer for modern applications, which enables developers to write declarative step functions in code by combining durable execution, event streams, and queues into a single serverless platform. The article highlights the key challenges encountered while developing such a platform: fairness, multi-tenancy, contention, concurrency, read/write load, infrastructure, observability, and customizability. To solve these problems, they developed a brand new queue from scratch for Inngest. This queue is fair, low-latency, and multi-tenant, operating with multiple shared-nothing workers that claim jobs in an almost contention-free way. The article also explains how this works in a multi-tenancy environment, where thousands of users run millions of functions simultaneously. It discusses the concept of unfairness in classic queues and how they built a fair multi-tenant queue to solve it. The solution involves creating separate queues for each function, using a higher level queue to record each function's earliest available job, and ensuring that every function runs independently to guarantee fairness. The conclusion emphasizes the benefits of this approach, which allows queues to become cheap and creates virtual queues to add multiple concurrency levels to each function. This solution provides reliability layers like Inngest, abstracting everything for users declaratively by code so that even fresh engineers can build reliable systems without needing to understand how queueing works.

Inngest introduces a new bulk cancellation API to manage backlogs in production systems efficiently. The API allows users to configure which functions to cancel using date ranges or selective cancellation based on event data. This feature enables quick and precise management of queues, ensuring smooth operation of the system.

Inngest has recently extended support for Astro, a web framework specializing in content-driven websites. Astro supports custom API endpoints which can be used for tasks like accessing a database, authentication, or supercharging your website with more complex functionality. However, there are benefits to adding your API routes into your Astro codebase, such as reducing context-switching and allowing the product team to manage the E2E experience. Inngest takes care of making complex workflows easy to build, manage, and scale by handling task scheduling, execution, retries, and monitoring. It is language and framework agnostic, working across your entire system and communicating with different codebases via events and queues.