Every app you've built is an ETL pipeline

ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) pipelines are integral to many web applications but often become overly complex and problematic when improperly managed, evolving from simple scripts to intricate orchestration systems. This complexity is exacerbated by the integration of AI features, which introduce non-deterministic transformations that can lead to unpredictable outputs and increased costs due to retries. Developers often face challenges such as tracking job status, handling retries, and implementing idempotency, which can complicate data management and lead to bugs like data duplication. Inngest offers a solution by providing a step-level retry system that simplifies ETL processes by decoupling events and reactions, allowing for independent, event-driven functions that automatically manage retries and provide built-in observability without requiring developers to build extensive infrastructure. This approach enables developers to focus on domain-specific tasks while ensuring reliable and scalable data pipelines, ultimately making ETL infrastructure management a less burdensome task.