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paxys
rubenfiszel
The critics is more than fair and our positioning is not very clear.
We are doing a developer platform for enterprise to build internal software, including apis, workflows, background jobs, and UIs using code, but only where it matters. We happen to be quite decent in all aspects, with a focus on performance, and we have an active community of users and customers that are mostly developers and hence have plethora of feedback and feature requests, so we're happy to oblige.
By being at the right level and trying to expose the code as much as possible, we can be great generalists without sacrificing on the quality. Python, Typescripts, Go, Bash and all the query languages are where all the complexity is and capabilities come from. They are well developed languages with great ecosystem. We merely provide a way to run those language in a system fit for production at enterprise scale.
MuffinFlavored
> We are doing a developer platform for enterprise to build internal software
> for enterprise
I mentioned this product to my enterprise boss and his enterprise answer was "we can't easily get this approved by tech-selection committee for no good reason" (and that would have just been to have an off-to-the-side proof-of-concept instance or two running in our sandbox k8s cluster let alone actually bringing it onboard as a paid service)
How do enterprise users not already have the functionality you are offering covered one way or another and why would they migrate off of what they have to what you are offering? What kind of business today doesn't have something like ActiveBatch, AWS/Azure functionality with massive cloud support contracts, etc. already?
rubenfiszel
You can't win every contracts but the market we're after is immense and so even a small percentage of enterprises being more daring is sufficient.
But the argument is true for any enterprise software, you cannot be small and sell to enterprise (or you must have amazing product market fit), that's where open-source comes in.
We have overlap with many existing products, but we are the only one to provide such product, with emphasis on DX and excellent performance and scalability, and to be open-source. We do currently have a few big enterprise customers and many enterprise open-source users. It's a lot easier to get approval since they get it for free and it's fully self-hostable and air-grappable. Once they have tried it on a few non-essential workflow and see the benefits, then they are more motivated to make a case internally. Wide net, some catches until it becomes ubiquitous.
I happen to be a really strong believer in open-source so it's not just an adoption strategy but I think it happens to be also fortunately the best strategy for such infra level software.
haswell
I’ve been the person in a position to recommend enterprise solutions and have those recommendations taken.
I’ve also been the person on the other side of that relationship, helping potential customers make a case that my product is worthy of their software/services gatekeeper’s consideration.
There is often high motivation to bring in a smaller/newer tool, because the existing solutions are not scalable, or are missing a critical feature, or require a team of specialized people to make it work, or has onerous licensing costs, etc.
“Shadow IT” is also a very real thing. Someone’s boss is frustrated with the bureaucracy and timeframe for bringing something in and so they just throw it on a corp card or install it themselves and ask for forgiveness later. This happens everywhere and is often the precursor to forcing the product to become officially blessed because by now it’s supporting production workloads and has proven its worth.
This particular space is still ripe for innovation. Very few of the products that target this kind of tool building approach are close to finished and each has its quirks.
jordanbeiber
They have “not only one way or the other” - they have “all the ways” and this is exactly the problem you want a solution like this to fill.
We’re talking backoffice/cost-center workflows in IT, finance and HR - absolutely not business profit processes mind you.
A tool such as this can help an IT department take ownership of integrations and workflows, building them in a framework that can improve speed and quality. It will help with organizational scalability.
The alternative is in my experience a giant mess of integrations lacking ownership and observability.
Every large enterprise needs “something” like windmill, they might just not know it.
JacobThreeThree
>A workflow engine is a software application that manages business processes
>Enterprise resource planning (ERP) is the integrated management of main business processes, often in real-time and mediated by software and technology. ERP is usually referred to as a category of business management software—typically a suite of integrated applications—that an organization can use to collect, store, manage and interpret data from many business activities.
What is the difference between a workflow engine and an ERP system?
Why not call it an ERP system if you're targeting the broader enterprise market? As someone who is far from SV, the business people I know probably don't know what a workflow engine is, but they definitely know what an ERP system is.
Mandatum
> but only where it matters.
What does this mean?
rubenfiszel
Happy to expand on this. Only where you would consider to be not boilerplate, aka your business logic. I hate low-code that force me to use a rigid system for the core of my tools, but I love the velocity that it brings. What if we could have high-velocity for all the boilerplate (permissioning, queuing, frontend, secret management, etc, etc) but code for the business logic. That's what windmill is. In a way, this is what serverless was meant to be, write your business logic and servers autoscale and you can hook a gazillon managed services on top.
We bring that vision in a fully open-source and consistent platform that you can host wherever you please.
knowsuchagency
I had the same thought when it popped up on my radar a year ago. Now that I’ve been using it for a few weeks, it’s difficult to go back to the exact tools you’re naming. I didn’t realize how large of an impediment it is to move back and forth all of them. Windmill is the thing I never knew I needed. It’s changed how I think about delivering data products/solutions.
Kiro
What are you using it for? I don't understand the purpose of any of these tools.
debarshri
Doing one thing well is not a winning advice. You can do multiple things, it really depends on the execution and other factors. They are doing one that is workflows and doing it well.
MuffinFlavored
I don't really understand what a "workflow" is / what it means.
Like GitHub Actions is a workflow, but it's a convoluted YAML wrapper around shell scripts.
Is a workflow shell scripts? I'm going to guess no. I'm going to guess it's "code". So... why is a workflow code but code isn't a workflow?
Windmill is a "workflow (code?)" orchestrator?
uoaei
One task is the elementary unit of business operations, and one workflow is one DAG of tasks.
jagtstronaut
Yeah I assumed this was a camunda competitor (a bpmn workflow product), but it seems like it is not that.
sisve
Also they are using postgres for everything. I think that is a good example of picking one thing that you know very well and using that to the limits.
But i do agree that windmill is doing so many things that the elevator pitch need some work. But a lot of companies are trying to do the same. So i do not think people will think of workflow engine + online ide + app builder as a natural grouping in 5 years
MuffinFlavored
> Is it a competitor to Retool? Airflow? Temporal?
If it makes you feel any better, I'm pretty sure I personally couldn't tell you specifically what any of those specifically do in terms of "the one thing they do well" / why anybody would ever use one instead of the other / not need to use all 3 to accomplish the same thing slightly different ways
j45
The intersection of all those areas listed is often an inordinate amount of work and integration and maintenance.
In that way as people want an easily grokable description, windmill seems to be a super-platform that leverages enough of the important bits that come up.
I am going to try it out!
zo1
I'm also very confused about the pricing. Its "open-source" but with SSO user-limits? Paid version comes with Prometheus metrics, so does that mean the open-source free tier doesn't? So many questions.
halostatue
For our purposes it looks like Windmill might take the place of MWAA (Airflow) that we were planning for our ELT pipelines and could take the place of Rundeck as well. I'll need to look at it and play with it (especially from the ELT pipeline perspective for running transformers), but I suspect that we will be able to be up and running both faster and cheaper with either self-hosted Windmill or cloud.
anonzzzies
Many others have done the same thing (I mean, something like airtable is now 'everything' as well, as are many others). It's hard to do positioning though like this I must admit; for new users it's almost impossible to say what exactly it is. The 'what can I do with it?' -> 'everything' type of thing.
hintymad
Does being fast beyond certain threshold really matter for a workflow engine, though, especially given that many workflows have long-running tasks? What I find matters is multi-tenancy. That is, can a workflow system support as many jobs as a user desires, yet each job gets scheduled and executed as if it is the only one on the workflow engine. For instance, Amazon EC2 and EBS probably have millions of jobs and job queues running at any moment, yet each job has pretty predictable and stable startup delay and execution time. In contrast, each of Nomad and k8s has a global queue that sometimes gets stuck because of bad actors or too many pending jobs (I understand that an orchestrator is far more than just a workflow engine. I'm just contrasting the user experience).
rubenfiszel
So I agree that for most jobs taking already more than 300ms, a 50ms per job will not be perceivable anymore. What matters is the DX and even though I'm very proud of our performance, a lot of our work is focused on providing a consistently great developer experience in all aspects (vscode extension, instant deployment, etc, etc).
However, there is one big benefit to being performant which is that you can use the same stack for performance sensitive jobs such as event-streaming use cases. That remove the duplication of infrastructure. The other benefit is that it improve the developer experience overall with fast previews.
analyte123
Yes. Just think of how annoying it is when you have to wait 5 seconds instead of 0.5s for a 2FA message, then multiply that by everything that you ever do with your workflow engine. That's not even to speak of cases where running the workflow (e.g. acquiring data) faster is a competitive advantage, although this thing is still probably too slow for truly HFT-level tasks.
rubenfiszel
Yes it's too slow for HFT, but anything would be too slow for HFT unless it's custom built. You likely want a streaming engine or even hand-optimize all your event handlers to shave-off any nanoseconds.
stingraycharles
As someone who works with HFT firms, they typically do everything in ASICs or FPGAs anyway, so it’s not a good example.
samsquire
Just because I'm interested in this topic. I've been trying to shave nanoseconds on ringbuffers and barriers in C.
LMAX Disruptor can send a message between threads in 53 nanoseconds on average.
So you can essentially fork control flow in 53 nanoseconds and do 2 things in parallel.
Eyeballing my barrier I can synchronize in 42 nanoseconds and up.
3cats-in-a-coat
A workflow engine is indistinguishable from a regular interpreter or runtime, except for the fact it's suspendable (hence can run tasks long).
Ideally a workflow engine being fast means it can be just the platform you write everything in. The artificial separation between "normal" code and "workflow engines" is completely unnecessary. Our platforms are extremely fragmented, pointlessly so. Remote vs local, statically vs dynamically typed, async vs sync, short running vs long running...
If an engine is written without these arbitrary limitations, it can be more.
esafak
Speed is the number one reason I hate Airflow. It does not meet that "certain threshold".
haroldp
Is this what I need? We have ad hoc business processes like:
1. Sell service to client
2. Email client with scheduling info
3. Agree to scheduling date with client
4. Send client email with documentation and request their data
5. Remind client to send data
6. Alert admins data hasn't been received
7. Beat data out of client
8. Prepare data
9. QA and checkoff service
10. Email client to review and approve
11. Publish/run service
12. Send client stats/results
And I want to move that from spreadsheets, personal emails and admins keeping in their head where everything is at, to web forms and uploads, automated emails and dashboards. I looked at airtable, smartsheet, budibase and many others but they seem to be very project-based, where you are inventing a unique workflow for each project and using it to keep managers on top of where their team is at with the various steps. Project Management vs process management. None of them seem to have decent calendar integration. Few of them seem to be great about emails or scheduled scripts.
I have APIs for my data, or I can code them if needed. I'd prefer a low-code to a no-code approach, where managers have a spreadsheet view and can do some of of the UI work and programmers can make it do stuff and handle integrations.
rubenfiszel
Yes, windmill would likely be a great fit for that as long as you're willing to do a little bit of coding.
For instance, we do not have a calendar integration per se but can manage your oauth tokens towards any service (including gcalendar) and allow you to write code using their official sdks.
For spreadsheets, you can build a similar interface in windmill using aggrid.
It seems you also need approval steps and have your workflows wait for events, and that's built-in in our workflows.
IanCal
If you want to explore this I'd recommend taking the approach I've seen with scripts that's very successful -
The first bash script simply tells a person what to do and hit enter when they've done it.
Then the easiest to automate parts are automated, as and when it's valuable to do so.
Windmill appears to have manual approval steps - so you could try modelling things just with those. Then automate the most annoying/costly/easy to automate steps one by one.
This should be easier to create, and actually solves an initial problem of knowing where everything is up to. If it doesn't help, or the process is too inflexible when reality hits it, you won't have spent too long automating things.
erichocean
I don't think that'll achieve your goals, it's far too clunky and inflexible for actually running a business end-to-end. (No knock on Windmill, they're all like this in my experience as the way they model the world is how a programmer thinks about things, not a business owner. BPMN is straight up cancer—avoid.)
I would suggest looking at workflow systems within the VFX space, which they call "pipelines". They are human-driven and maintained, but support very high levels of process automation.
VFX pipelines are written in Python, but the key thing is, they're very good at a few things simultaneously:
(1) Highly irregular work…
(2) That nevertheless requires lots of process, including of the ad hoc variety…
(3) With high human touch (human in the loop), so calendars, task assignments, timelines, approvals, producer dashboards, etc.
(4) That's repeatable on the next project/opportunity, with as much customization as needed.
As a bonus, pipelines handle billions of dollars of work annually under high pressure, with tens of thousands of users, so there's a lot of hard won experience built into them.
I personally have found that there are three levels of VFX pipeline tech that need to be combined and customized to do everything. This is the most recent stack I've set up:
* Kitsu for the producer/manager level, human task assignments. Mainly for managers, has the calendar functionality.
* Prism Pipeline for software integration (i.e. keeping the humans following the process). This is what people actually do.
* Kabaret for compute work. People usually kick off these jobs, but they're handled by the farm. You'll be responsible for everything that happens here. [0]
Don't try to get by with just one or two of the three, even though feature-wise it looks like you might be able to. Incorporating computer-driven workflows is tricky and requires purpose-built libraries in my experience. Just use the right library for the job, and accept that they all have somewhat overlapping functionality.
For most non-VFX work, you'll need to script access to the browser, since that's where people do stuff today (i.e. with the Prism Pipeline library). Launch Chrome, Firefox, or Edge with a debug port and use Playwright as your "plugin" mechanism, with Prism/Python as the driver. You can make your pages do whatever you want and script literally any web-based process, filling in fields from your database as needed, adding data to the page, etc.
For the last six years, I've run a business that does around $5M of annual revenue using this approach, with 4 FTE people (including me). We handle around 40 million compute tasks a day, but also have all of the "daily work" where humans are in the loop. We do all of the tasks of the type you've listed.
HTH!
[0] If you need fully automated task generation (so, no human in the loop), write "pump" scripts in plain Python that push jobs into Kitsu or Kabaret at a particular interval. I personally run them under a god monitor, and have them exit after, say, 15 minutes (or whatever interval makes sense) to get cron-like functionality. This is useful because you can pause execution of any pump process easily, change the interval, restart them, etc. plus you get easy access to the logs for debugging. The scripts themselves are usually less than 100 LOC. I have around 60 of these that run the automatic parts of our business.
Whenever I need custom, temporary behavior in this part of the business, I copy the pump script, edit the original to avoid the special case, and have the new script only handle the special case (with whatever new behavior I need). Done, takes very little time, and is easy to run temporarily (e.g. for the next week, a common occurrence because some downstream vendor has caused a problem we need to work around).
Another approach to trigger tasks/workflows is to have a server that gets pinged by 3rd parties (e.g. Webhooks) and does the same whenever the endpoint is invoked. We have that too, but it's literally just a few scripts. (Most workflow systems seem to believe this is damn near 100% of the stuff that needs to be "automated.")
sisve
Searching for "Vfx pipeline" just gave me visual effects stuff. Quite sure that was not what you talked about. Could you explain a bit more what ypu mean by it and point to a resource. Keen to learn more.
I think windmill could have helped with several of the task and automated some. Its very easy to create dashboard and table with statuses. But its def not a process tool, if that was what he was after.
erichocean
Sorry, yes, VFX is "visual effects".
A sibling already gave links to Kabaret and Prism.
Here's the link to Kitsu: https://www.cg-wire.com/
Github here: https://github.com/cgwire/kitsu
All of these projects are targeted at VFX/animation, but there's nothing about them that ties them to those things, it's just why they were developed. You can use them to run any kind of business IMO.
I posted about it because (a) they handle the commenter's use case, and (b) most HN people are probably unaware they exist and would be discouraged into thinking they are only useful for VFX/animation when in fact they are general approaches to running a business that requires high interaction between humans, processes, and background jobs in a very dynamic environment.
Zalastax
I would also like to understand better. But it seems like it is visual effects that is meant. These tools were mentioned by name: https://www.kabaretstudio.com/ https://prism-pipeline.com/
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haroldp
Thank you for the detailed reply.
MuffinFlavored
I wonder how far you'd get with the very "not technical" https://getjobber.com/
Only because you said "sell service to client", schedule date with client, etc.
haroldp
Jobber looks like it is more in the "project management" space. All of my processes are post-sales. We're not inventing new projects that we need to organize. We have a short list of services we sell and each of them has a process with a lot of dependent steps that require a lot of communication and coordination.
MuffinFlavored
> We have a short list of services we sell and each of them has a process with a lot of dependent steps that require a lot of communication and coordination.
Something that comes to mind: In Jira my administrators have locked it down so I can't move certain tickets to certain statuses
https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/guides/workflows/ove...
bafe
Looks like the use case for BPMN and an engine that can execute processes described in that notation.
smrtinsert
Aren't these CRM use cases?
michaelmcmillan
Same here. Use n8n. Self hosted and open source.
foxbee
Why did Budibase not suffice?
boxed
It always amazes me that people spend this much time and effort on writing articles like this and don't run their text through a spell checker even once.
It also amazes me that people still use text editors that by default doesn't spellcheck. Anyone know what editors that could be? Seems pretty crazy in 2023!
andrewstuart2
If this is an engineer, they probably use whatever tool they're most familiar with, and that tool is probably set up for mostly engineering (code) work, in which case in my experience spell checking is a major distraction with an outsized ratio of false positives, because my identifiers aren't chosen for their validity in a wordlist. Even in markdown, it's more annoying than helpful most of the time, so I tend to leave it as a manual step that I mostly ignore. People know what I mean 99.99% of the time. So, that'd be my guess. Any sort of editor that's been tuned to an engineer's preferences which includes only manual spell checking.
boxed
PyCharm has a spell checker. It's pretty great. Not using it seems madness.
senorrib
Spellchecker in Jetbrains IDEs is terrible. It throws a lot of false positives.
j_maffe
Yeah, but this sort of article is what you get at the end of the day. Plus there are several ways of getting rid of false positives and as GP said: at least do it before posting.
rubenfiszel
You're right, I apologize. Truth is I wrote everything in vscode markdown and really wanted to finish the article before going out for dinner and I ended up skipping it. We fixed everything
cooperaustinj
The Code Spell Checker extension is great. It has proper handling for camelcase and it's fast to add words to the dictionary (cmd + .). Catches many typos when coding.
Probably not best for the last line of defence for public articles, but probably good enough.
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=streetsi...
code_biologist
I turn off spell check in any text editor I touch because I can't handle the visual noise. Agreed on running spell check. The few grammar issues in the article made my brain glitch for sure.
boxed
What noise? The noise of you making tons of spelling errors?
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Frivolous9421
who craes
slig
I've been following Windmill since their HN Launch (my first script was edited 540 ago, just checked). Less than a year ago I started using it more heavily and it's been a breeze. Their Discord server is very active and Ruben usually replies and fixes bugs in minutes, even on weekends.
thelastparadise
What do you use it for?
slig
Daily puzzle generation, daily PDF updates/creation (if the original content is changed, it triggers a new generation), triggering and editing of Remotion videos.
atlas_hugged
It says open source, then it says limit of 10 SSO users. IANAL so this confuses me. Can you explain what this means?
Actually, that sounds rude, excuse the ‘tism, I’m sorry. I’m just not super familiar with the license stuff, I generally only touch MIT licensed code when it’s work related, but I thought open source generally allows modification to code. So how do you enforce a limit of 10? I just skimmed the code a bit because of this confusion and I see stuff about enforcing a license in there. So couldn’t anyone just remove that license check code if it’s open-source?
If that can’t be modified, then it’s just “source available”, isn’t it? Which to me is also fine, I just feel like I’m being either misled, if you get what I’m saying?
Basically I think this project is pretty cool, so I wanted to bring it up to my boss because I think we have a need for this, and I had previously brought up Airflow, but I don’t know how to explain this to her.
Sorry for the stream of consciousness. Typing on mobile while answering Teams messages and tickets.
rubenfiszel
Some people will argue we are open-core because almost everything is open-source (AGPL) but our sso and enterprise plugins are under a source-available proprietary license.
The reason that we didn't split them out of the codebase is that it's harder to maintain and would require to load the plugins. We didn't want to waste time on that when we had so much to build.
atlas_hugged
oh ok I see. Just the SSO part is like that. That makes more sense.
So I guess I can just self-host for our team of 7 without SSO and we can finally organize these messy cron jobs we’ve accumulated. We would not be reselling at all. Just organizing some annoying aspects of our day to day.
Thanks for the clarification. Much appreciated. If we end up expanding our usage down the road, I’ll see if I can convince her to consider shelling out funds for the SSO stuff too. I’d love to be able to support this project. Seems pretty cool!
rubenfiszel
You can even self-host with SSO for 7 people. The SSO is free up to 10ppl.
You will never have to pay if you do not want to.
We believe there are many reasons to start using Windmill and most of them are not worth monetizing by themselves but we strive to build a software so great that you will move more and more stuff on there and at that point, you will want our enterprise plugins.
We also mostly monetize bigger companies.
jagged-chisel
I would hazard a guess that the SSO part is not open source and could be handled by a non-open plug-in. I should go read the code …
Edit: sniped by someone in-the-know
code_biologist
Windmill is great. Definitely don't stray from the self-hostable + DX mission! I haven't had need to use it professionally, but I use it on a home server to run several small web crawlers and yt-dlp jobs. Really fun piece of tooling.
darkteflon
Could you clarify what you mean by “definitely don't stray from the self-hostable + DX mission”?
code_biologist
I hate cron for running small personal scripts and jobs. I hate ad-hoc handling of logging / observability / success monitoring. I want a web UI for all of it. I hate trying to figure out how to handle event based job triggers that are more fancy than the 10 line bash script they end up running. I hate trying to wrap up solutions for all those into infrastructure as code — I will end up running an unpatched Ubuntu 20 for the next decade if I can't just nuke the box and reload my config + scripts. I hate the idea of relying on the continued existence of a hosted service, as well as them being able to see that I'm fine tuning an LLM for erotic stories (or whatever).
Windmill solved all that for me. I write a short little Python script, paste it into the web UI and boom it's running with good answers for all the above issues. That's great DX.
If workflow engines try to solve every problem they can devolve into plugin and complexity hell. Jenkins issues have caused a lot of headache at my day job lately. I don't want Windmill to fall into the same trap.
darkteflon
Thanks, that’s really helpful - agreed on all accounts!
RandomBK
I would love to begin using this system, but the licensing is giving me serious pause. While most of the software is under the AGPLv3, the Commercial License section of the README [0] implies that the company takes on a fairly broad interpretation of the AGPL.
In particular, the line "[...] to build a feature on top of Windmill, to comply with AGPLv3 your product must be AGPLv3 [...]" seems to imply the company aligns with the stance taken by Google and other companies: that even calling the application via API is enough to trigger copyleft [1].
This implies that if I were to build a sign-up form that triggers a Windmill workflow in the backend, my entire application would either need to be AGPLv3 or I would need a commercial license.
That's perfectly reasonable, as it means any non-AGPL use will have to contribute back to Windmill via a commercial license. However, it does mean positioning this as an "Fully Open-source" alternative to Airflow is only technically correct. This is much closer in practice to "source available" than how most developers would think as "open source".
If this isn't how Windmill wants their license interpreted, I highly encourage clarifying things.
[0] https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill#commercial-license
[1] https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/using/agpl...
rubenfiszel
Sorry for the lack of clarity. By product we mean white-labelling windmill, not triggering a script or flow by api.
RandomBK
Got it! That's great to hear. It'd be great to explicitly clarify that in the README :)
Out of curiosity: Have you considered alternative licenses like SSPL or the Elastic license, which make a clear(er) delineation between whitelabelling/hosting vs simply using the application? I'm sure I'm not the first person to have written off Windmill because of the AGPL.
rubenfiszel
Those licenses are not open-source and likely to be more restrictive than what we currently offer. It was important for me to be truly open-source.
If you are using windmill as a whole, you're free to use it however you please with the AGPL but for customers with doubts, we do sell an enterprise/commercial license.
iFire
rubenfiszel
We use a mix of AGPL for 95% of the code, Apache 2.0 for specs definitions and apis, and source-available for our enterprise plugins.
SpaghettiCthulu
What on Earth is confusing about that?
knowsuchagency
Windmill is fantastic. It manages to cover so much ground i.e. airflow, prefect, retool, budibase but better
nextworddev
It’s mainly for workflows but not for building rest endpoints?
sisve
I think the workflow engine is the _best_ part of it, but together with the script editor (online code editor with LSP support) and a drag-n-drop app builder, that is for developers, so you "drop down" to code much of the logic and connect it to script or workflow, it's a really nice combo. (you see a lot of other companies trying to span out to workflow + script + appbuilder).
It's really made for developers or at least people that want code as a "first class citizen" of the platform. So i has a cli to sync to/from a VCS, VS code extention. But at the same time I have gotten a tech savvy person on the customer success team to create a workflow where they connect to our API and actually create meaningful services way faster then the enterprise developer team would have done.
The script and flows get automatically endpoints to connect to, but all request is saved to db, and picked up by a worker that has to save the result to disk, before the server again pick up the result and send it to a client. So I would not use it to customer. I have used it for a lot of internal tools to employees. Meaning they can wait 1-2 sec, because you can teach them that it works and you provide a lot of value.
ryanjshaw
> It's really made for developers or at least people that want code as a "first class citizen" of the platform.
Power Automate doesn't have this (unless you hack it into custom connectors) and it's a really puzzling decision.
I guess they want you to use Azure Functions but those need a PhD to understand and the deal with the security surface.
nextworddev
Ok so nothing is stopping us from wrapping around it as a backend for a CRuD app?
majkinetor
I am using Rundeck now to schedule project jobs, get notified on errors, provide UI for PowerShells/bash scripts, and have decent project and user management. It uses Quartz and can handle hundreds of jobs per minute without a problem. It can connect to git repository to keep job definitions there. I also use local file system a lot (on Windows or Linux) as I don't like to edit my scripts in browser, given that they are mini programs with lots of separate includes.
I would like to try windmill instead. Can it cover all those cases, particularly the part where scripts are on the file system? Can I use automatic GUI creation for PowerShell scripts of windmill in such case? Rundeck transmits environment variables with GUI values when starting script.
rubenfiszel
Not only it can cover those cases, you will likely be pleased with the advantages of such system (the automatic GUI creation is just one of those).
The binary itself doesn't sandbox your processes unless you're in the nsjail mode. Hence, if you either use the binary raw (without docker) or mount the filesystem to be available to your container, it can run anything that is available on the filesystem.
majkinetor
I played a bit now on cloud and was able to run things in powershell and create a custom GUI form, connect button to script and show results in the text area.
I didn't succeed to return all output from the powershell, just last value. The only way I got it is by using control "job log". This one however has some custom header of windmill (job guid etc.), so is there any way to show a raw log ?
I generally do not like no-code tools, but first impression of this mix of no-code and code looks intriguing and app feels very nice overall, with great UI and easy to understand features. Good job.
rubenfiszel
So bash and powershell are a bit special since they are the only one that are not implemented as using a main function and thus have no result to return.
However, we had that feedback a few time so there is a trick. If you write your result in ./result.json, we will process it as the result of your powershell script.
radiowave
I looked in to this a little when Windmill was last discussed here, and the gap you may bump into (as a replacement for Rundeck) is that AFAICT Windmill has no support for executing scripts remotely over (e.g.) SSH and passing the GUI values along as environment variables.
It seems you need a full-blown install of Windmill on each host where actions are to be run.
rubenfiszel
Curious why you wouldn't be able to do this using a bash script in windmill and ssh to your target
radiowave
It's a good question, and deserves a more detailed answer than I'm able to give without more first-hand experience with trying to use Windmill in this way. But my sense of it is that there's likely to be a chunk of legwork involved in the passing of parameters and credentially over to the remote host, capturing both stdout and stderr from the remote site - things that Rundeck handles pretty much seamlessly - and a concern that using Windmill like this the question of which host the job is executing on isn't a first-class concept, like it is in rundeck.
It's likely that in time I will evaluate Windmill to get a more detailed understanding of this - there's definitely aspects of it that are very substantial improvements on what can be done in Rundeck.
But inevitably, the question of whether to learn & install & maintain two separate systems side by side, with some degree of overlap in their functionality, vs. just picking one system to do the whole job and living with the shortcomings of whatever it doesn't do so well - it's always going to be a difficult one to weigh up.
alexchamberlain
Interesting that Windmill's backend seems to be implemented in Rust, but the docs talk about supporting jobs written in Python, TypeScript and Go. I understand there is generic Docker support, but does anyone know if you can run Rust jobs natively?
rubenfiszel
We could add support for Rust, and it would work the same as go, do a built step prior, and then cache the binary. If we have enough demand for it, we will add it (we are a small team and can only prioritize what's popular unfortunately).
On a personal note, I write a lot of rust (and love it) but using rust for writing non-backend type of stuff is not something I would do myself. I'm more of a believer of hybrid like polars that optimize the compute in Rust but provide a compatible sdk in python.
sisve
It can not. (It does support go)
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The devs of Windmill seem to have taken the winning advice of "do one thing and do it well" and done the exact opposite. Going over windmill.dev I have no idea what specifically the software should be used for. Is it a competitor to Retool? Airflow? Temporal? Apparently there's a no-code workflow builder? A drag and drop UI builder? An online IDE? Dozens of integrations? What on earth is going on??