Flow – Create automated workflows between your favorite apps | Hacker News Reader

Flow – Create automated workflows between your favorite apps

flow.microsoft.com

213 pointsdvcrn60 comments

This is an area I work in [1]. Folks understandably mention IFTTT/Zapier a lot but the big players in the enterprise integration space are SnapLogic, Mulesoft, Informatica, Dell Boomi, with maybe a couple of others making noise also.

App integration is only one part of it (and arguably the easiest part) - there's also Data integration, IoT/event streaming pipelines, and integrations suitable for Big Data processing.

Enterprises naturally have quite specific demands on things like security, governance, encryption, support etc. that move things away from the free integration products, and also

I haven't seen much of Flow so far but will pay attention to it. The UX appears quite simple - it is difficult to build an effective integration product that is friendly to non-technical folks, while still being powerful enough for orchestrating complex pipelines by skilled data architects and developers.

It's a crowded space however, so getting traction may be challenging. I'm interested to seeing how they go forward with this.

[1] http://www.snaplogic.com

This seems like a IFTTT + pipes mashup? With multiple steps, simple logic blocks, and enterprise integration.

it sure does. But it looks like it's trying to focus mainly on companies and business users instead of normal everyday people. Almost all integrations are very business-ey

What I am also happy to see is a clear pricing model right from the start [0], in contrast to what IFTTT is doing.

[0]: https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/

The business focus reminds me of Zapier.

https://zapier.com/

Yes, and that's probably why it'll be successful. There is a lot of money to be made in taking <consumer facing thing> and adding enterprise integration.

I mean, look at Slack. It's "merely" IRC + enterprise integration, right?

shit, my company had a "when a user is created or deleted in AD, do X" type of functionality, we could save so much freaking money money its ridiculous. Im still. planning on sitting down and building it.

They have that. Check out Quest/Dell/whatever ActiveRoles and other Identity Management type competitors. I think any big enterprise vendor has an offering. The problem with a lot of them is the price-they're pretty spicy. But they are going after enterprise players with deep pockets.

Cool, I'll take a look. I've evaluated a couple identity management solutions, but for the most part we don't need it. We have an AD/ADFS/SAML/etc... setup that works great for the most part.

I just want to avoid paying the stupid premium on stuff like the enterprise version of Slack just for AD integration.

Mattermost?

That's a pretty cool idea for Mattermost to have triggers that go off on new account creation.

Maybe a customizable welcome email as well for new team members.

You're basically still writing the automation yourself at that point since it would just be a bot right? I'd think you might as well just create it as a separate service and have a bot interact with it or handle events from it in Mattermost/Slack/IRC/etc.

I don't know if IFTTT should be worried –or happy– about this.

Maybe worried. I looked at IFTTT a few times and came back with "I'd like to use that, but I need a filter / processor in between". I suspect there are more people like that.

Pretty interesting. Which filtering or processing are you interested in doing?

Zapier is in the same game.

This is what Yahoo could have gotten into, had Bartz not axed their engineering department.

I recommend digging into the available actions, this looks more flexible than anything else in this space (eg IFTTT, Zapier). There's control flow (if and while), and some actions aren't tied to any service: there's a "Recurrence" action that allows to trigger actions at specific intervals, an "HTTP" action that can send a request with any URL+method+headers+body+auth, there's a "Delay" action, FTP and SMTP output actions...

edit: "HTTP" can also be a trigger.

edit:

List of service agnostic triggers:

- Recurrence (RecurrenceTrigger an event to run at regular, customized time intervals)

- HTTP (Trigger an event based on a select REST API)

- HTTP + Swagger (Trigger an event based on a select Swagger-enabled API)

- Button (Manually trigger a flow)

- Request (This is an incoming API call that could use actions in a Logic App or other API to trigger this flow)

- RSS - When a feed item is published (Triggers a workflow when a new feed item is published)

edit:

List of service agnostic actions:

- S/FTP - Create file (This operation creates a file)

- S/FTP - List files in folder (This operation gets the list of files and subfolders in a folder)

- Delay (Set how long an action should be delayed once the flow is triggered)

- Delay until (Delay an action until a specific date. For shorter time periods, use the Delay action instead)

- HTTP (Choose a REST API to invoke)

- HTTP + Swagger (Choose a Swagger-enabled API to invoke)

- Response (This is an incoming API call that could use the results of an action to trigger this flow)

- Compose ?

- Filter Array

- Mail (Sends an email)

- Push notification - Send a push notification (Sends a push notification to the Flow app)

- RSS - List all RSS feed items (Get all RSS feed items)

- SMTP - Send Email (This operation sends an email to one or more recipients)

It's worth noting that this is just Azure logic apps with a front end. You can write API and Logic apps yourself and publish to your users.

Not sure if you've looked at Zapier recently, but they've added all sorts of functionality: multi-step zaps, filtering + logic

You can even write your own code to extend things in Python and JS.

I did not. I'll take a second look. Thanks.

Given Microsoft's increasing emphasis on businesses, it makes sense that this is more enterprise-focused.

The product itself doesn't seem much different from Apple's Automator. Microsoft's marketing of Flow, however, is better at demonstrating the product's power. Apple never quite did that.

Hopefully its UI isn't as inscrutable as Automator's.

I agree. I've opened Automator with a naive optimism that I can learn it and become more productive. I've been wrong each and every time!

Microsoft Flow has been around for few months now (in Public Preview), but they just announced its General Availability.

https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-ga/

It's got potential, mashing up pipes and IFTTT with Enterprise as others have said, but I can't help hearing Admiral Akbar's "it's a trap!". It would need to be amazing and look long term viable enough before I'd suggest putting key processes in to it. Something like this seems more appealing: https://github.com/cantino/huginn/blob/master/README.md

Do you have to include a Microsoft asset somewhere in the flow pipeline, or can it work totally independently of any Microsoft apps? (eg/ Twitter => Slack etc.)

It doesn't need any Microsoft asset in the pipeline.

Besides Flow itself, of course.

I've been using this for a little while. The RESTful interface is pretty cool for stuff that isn't natively part of the interface.

Previously - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11600739

Microsoft's attempt at Zapier?

I'm sure I saw this as a tech demo (on the Azure equivalent of AppSpot) a year or so ago. Anyone remember it?

Yes. This was announced earlier this year. Just looks like an IFTTT copy. http://www.theverge.com/2016/4/29/11535232/microsoft-flow-if...

IFTTT + Sanctioned by corporate IT? This could be huge.

Reminds me of Yahoo Pipes but on a OS level, which is very interesting. I hope it gets the ease of use it deserves so that it's not just a fringe of users that end up automating their tasks. Thumbs up from me!

There is also the similar open source project: Bip.io = https://github.com/bipio-server/bipio

I miss Mayhem. Mayhem was an open source IFTTT-like application that ran on your own PC that Microsoft made a few years back.

You can follow us at http://www.nodecode.io. It is a flow based programming platform written almost entirely in c++ that runs completely on your local network but you can connect to it using a secure websocket from outside your NAT. It is still early for us and we are still working on adding micro-services but the Raspberry Pi GPIO, Insteon, Twitter and basic remote command line services seem to be working well.

So like Zapier?

Should Zapier be worried ? Probably not, unless Microsoft suddenly forms a large division out of this and manages to get a 100 - 200 integrations going.

Zapier has a built in lock in in their business. Once you get workflows running why move them over to a new service.

Does Zapier allow you to download an xml backup of your workflow definitions?

If so, if a solid competitor arrives, that maybe has one killer feature, and they can read those xml files, you can move with minimal downtime.

Here's a small how-to on how to add your own service: https://powerapps.microsoft.com/nl-nl/tutorials/register-cus...

Side note - Is anyone else's CPU going mad on that page? Chrome PC just goes flat out sitting on that page.

UPDATE: it's my adblocker. It blocks a part of the page and the javascript tries to constantly load it if it fails, resulting in about 1000 errors/second in the console :)

This might explain a long running mystery I've had when I have loooots of tabs open.

But then, how to find the tab that's stuck in that process? (In FF in my case.)

I had to close the tab while looking at the CPU % to work out that it was that tab.

about:performance should be able to tell you

Would love your feedback on our app integration platform - Flowgear (we came first!)

You can see what our workflows look like without creating an account at https://flowgear.me/s/hZfxYnf

They're trying to charge for the ease? of doing things like sending notifications for item creation in Sharepoint lists, when Sharepoint does this already for you free. It looks like a hard push for transitioning the whole suite of products to the Azure cloud. $$

Seems like IFTTT will end up being a niche for IoT-specific integrations while this will be used for enterprise integration. What is the value here for Microsoft when you can create integrations between only competitors like Google services?

>What is the value here for Microsoft when you can create integrations between only competitors like Google services?

https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/

Missed that, thanks

Off topic but the name, Flow, will get confusing fast.

Flow is already used by several projects including Facebook's Flow, a direct competitor to Microsoft Typscript.

Meanwhile FlowType.js helps with typography.

Not to be confused with Flowjs, which is for HTML5 file transfer.

This is probably going to end up in a search ranking dance off with whoever has the deepest pockets winning.

https://flowtype.org http://simplefocus.com/flowtype/ https://github.com/flowjs

So only confusing to JS devs

Well that's OK then. :)

That was really just first three things that came to mind as I know that Typescript competes with Flow (the open source project started by Facebook).

Other non-javascript products with the same name include project and workflow management software.

My point was more about how larger organisations usually win when they take a common or functional name for their products.

Microsoft has a long history of trademarking generic terms. I mean if I use the phrase "an SQL database server" or "a windowing operating system" which products do you think of?

In the case of "Flow" it's an overloaded product name and whichever entry comes up first in Google's search results will probably end up 'owning' the name. Currently for my results it's Microsoft.

Does Google have anything equivalent to this?

Doesn't look like it.

So... this is... apples automater?

Looks like if in Microsof were trying hard to assimilate things that are present in Linux since decades.

So a competitor to AWS SWF?

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