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Airplane.dev raises $32M in Series B funding

• gneray 4y ago
  Congrats! Great product
• metadat 4y ago
  I thought it'd offer programmatic access to Airplanes. Congrats to the Airplane.dev team, even though the product has nothing to do with airplanes :) "Ok, then what is it?" you ask > Developer infrastructure for internal tools. Airplane is a developer-centric approach to building internal UIs and workflows.
  • yrgulation 4y ago
    The issue is most such tools sit on internal networks.
• jugg1es 4y ago
  So this is a SaaS product that triggers code execution on your production resources? IT would never let us use this.
  • gberger 4y ago
    RCE As A Service, what's not to like?
  • idealmedtech 4y ago
    Code execution of code written by your own engineers!
  • bryfb 4y ago
    Eventually, and given this funding that time may be now in fact, they'll just build an on-prem version that will probably be wildly expensive. In that sense it has the same security considerations as other SaaS products.
• robcorn 4y ago
  I've used them when building a web app to host a simple cron job. Way more reliable and punctual than github actions imo
• moffkalast 4y ago
  I wonder how they picked the name, probably drawing random words from a bucket. We've gone from solidly exact names to vaguely descriptive ones, then to completely unrelated and now apparently to actively misleading.
  • missedthecue 4y ago
    Let's go back to US Steel and Standard Oil and Federated Power Corp
    • moffkalast 4y ago
      Unironically.
    • pxue 4y ago
      U40p.co
  • mattw2121 4y ago
    I was wondering if their name was influenced by Apache Airflow.
    • moffkalast 4y ago
      That would be more of a Downwash.dev
  • joshma 4y ago
    (I'm one of the founders at Airplane.) It started as a reference to "lightweight control plane[0] for your company" - but also the domains were loosely available. [0] https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/network-layer/what-is-the-control-plane/ https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/network-layer/what-is-th...
  • TylerE 4y ago
    I'll take it over another Xubiquiti
  • tintor 4y ago
• rubenfiszel 4y ago
  Congrats on the series B and very interesting approach with the Views. Developer tools, especially ones around code should be open-source. If you like the idea of productionizing one-off scripts, building flows, and managing secrets and schedules in an integrated platform, we have made the same observation as the Airplane team but in a fully open-source manner: [1]. Being open-source in this space offers a lot of synergies, you can for instance build a community around sharing the modules that compose your flows: [2] In addition, if your primary languages are Typescript, Python or Go, we offer a more integrated experience by parsing the script parameters directly to generate the input spec and the frontend. We are developing our own UI builder as well, more to be announced in the next month. We just released our helm-charts for easier self-hosted deployments: [4] You can also try it for free at [5] [1]: https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill [2]: https://hub.windmill.dev https://hub.windmill.dev [3]: https://windmill.dev https://windmill.dev [4]: https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill-helm-charts https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill-helm-charts [5]: https://app.windmill.dev https://app.windmill.dev
  • throw10920 4y ago
    > Developer tools, especially ones around code should be open-source. I don't agree. I want the freedom to choose what tools I use, and what their development/profit models are.
    • rubenfiszel 4y ago
      Open-source does not mean we do not have a sustainable business model. We offer enterprise license for specific plugins and hosted solutions as well. The difference is that you can read our code, audit it and self-host the full platform with less frictions. Kafka and Airflow are also open-source but the commercial company backing them are thriving. Plus if we were to disappear, the project would continue to go forward.
      • scarface74 4y ago
        How would the product go forward? By what definition is a company “thriving” that is losing money? Confluent (Kafka) https://siliconangle.com/2022/08/03/confluent-reports-strong-revenue-growth-rising-demand-streaming-data/ https://siliconangle.com/2022/08/03/confluent-reports-strong... > The company reported a loss before certain costs such as stock compensation of 16 cents per share, with revenue coming to $139.4 million in the quarter, growing 58% from a year earlier. That resulted in a net loss of $117.6 million for the quarter. The company behind AirFlow is AirBnB. Yes it’s “thriving”. But not based on AirFlow.
• ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
  How many paying users do you have currently?
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • zeroonetwothree 4y ago
    Did you read the post?
  • rsstack 4y ago
    The post says 100+ customers.
    • ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
      Are they all paying though? It seems so few to be raising a series b? Side projects get more users don't they?
• CharlesW 4y ago
  I'm having a hard time figuring out what this is and what it does. Is it sort of a modern Visual Basic with lots of data source connectors?
  • joshma 4y ago
    (Appreciate the feedback! We clearly need to continue to improve how we explain the product. :)) It's probably easiest to explain in terms of what a developer does on Airplane: 1. Dev writes code (e.g. see our Getting Started for views[0]) - this can be simple Python scripts, JS views, shell scripts, etc. 2. Dev uses the `airplane` CLI locally to run and test the code 3. Dev runs `airplane deploy` or pushes to GitHub to deploy the code to Airplane 4. Dev's teammate (or dev) can now visit app.airplane.dev to run the code (views, tasks, runbooks) - the execution defaults to Airplane's servers, but you can also use our self-hosted agents[1] to move the execution (data plane) to your own cloud environment. It's similar to GitHub actions in architecture (but for a different domain). [0] https://docs.airplane.dev/getting-started/views https://docs.airplane.dev/getting-started/views [1] https://docs.airplane.dev/self-hosting/agents https://docs.airplane.dev/self-hosting/agents
    • ayewo 4y ago
      I thought I understood what you do but with your itemized example, I'm somewhat confused. 1. OK 2. Dev uses the `airplane` CLI as opposed to running `npm`, `python` etc locally? 3. Dev runs `airplane deploy` as opposed to deploying to Heroku? I think it would be nicer for us if you explained your value proposition in terms of what tools/steps I'd be replacing if I choose to adopt Airplane.
      • joshma 4y ago
        2 - correct, depending on the task type we still call through to node etc. But the CLI also provides a dev UI and other niceties specific to Airplane. 3 - correct, the code is built and pushed to us, similar to Heroku. Our value prop ultimately is that 1) you can build tools like admin dashboards, data migration scripts, one off devops operations, etc, into production grade web apps and 2) you can do this using code!
• topherPedersen 4y ago
  joshma, should I use Airplane instead of creating cronjobs? I first heard about airplane the other day when I was googling alternatives to cron, or cron GUIs.
  • joshma 4y ago
    cron is a popular starting point on Airplane! We see our users creating tasks that are semi automated, but then adding manual tasks later (but then automating those tasks as well). The nice property of Airplane is that it's very composeable and extensible over time.
  • raviparikh 4y ago
    To add on to what Josh said, using Airplane for scheduling gets you a number of benefits over cron: - Serverless - no need to maintain a cron server or worry about where the job is running - Notifications - get notified in Slack or email if a failure happens - Logging - we'll record every run, what happened, etc - There are also a bunch of convenience features as well, e.g. having a native SQL integration so if you just want to run e.g. a query on a schedule, you can do so in minutes of work.
• elitan 4y ago
  That's an amazingly good looking landing page! Congrats on the funding!
• quadcore 4y ago
  Im impressed by the product. Congrats on the round.
• rsstack 4y ago
  We're Airplane customers, after evaluating Windmill and trying some AWS feature that might be similar but was too hard to configure. We had two focuses when choosing Airplane and they've been met so far thanks to both their good product and to their amazing team who were responsive & understanding to changing things to make our requirements work. 1. Super easy to use actions & internal UIs, that allow end-users to run things without following Confluence rituals/SOPs. So many things that used to be "ask an engineer to do this when they have time" are now just buttons or interactive screens. But engineering still has control: anything that can can an incident or that is hard to reverse, Airplane automated the approval workflow so that a qualified person can approve it - whether it's a task or a button in an internal UI. Also, several scheduled runbooks/workflows that we could have set up a system to run - but why do that (+ maintain it forever) if it takes 20 minutes to configure in Airplane? 2. Cannot introduce more risk than it reduced (because we _did_ have risk from people doing these things by following written procedures). Everything gets logged, critical things are reported as Datadog events + Slack messages, our tasks and UIs exist in multiple environments (and go through source control) so we can test them like real software. All tasks run on _our_ infrastructure, using our IAM roles (which we've worked with Airplane to get to their minimal form, where they can't touch anything non-Airplane'y - and they changed the default installation to match, so if you start using Airplane you'll benefit from that too) and security groups (which reach dedicated load balancer listeners that can validate the requests). We have set permissions to be as strict as Airplane allows, connected to Google Workspace user groups (and so audited regularly). Obviously whenever doing Build vs Buy: we could have built this. We could have also soldered our servers' circuitry on our own. But if someone needs something quick to automate their work, it takes less than an hour to set it up from scratch now and it's all straightforward.
• datavirtue 4y ago
  You get five seconds to make me look longer. Took me forever to sort of understand what airplane is, after getting over the cognitive hurdle of figuring out that this is not about aviation....at all.
  • rad_gruchalski 4y ago
    You had more than 5 seconds.