Show HN: CloudWright – Build apps in your own cloud | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: CloudWright – Build apps in your own cloud

medium.com

101 pointspwestling15 comments

Co-founder here. We’re excited to share our beta release.

CloudWright is a platform for building automation tools that connect to services, similar in spirit to Zapier, but with one big difference: on CloudWright you build your tools in Python. We think having the full power of a programming language available as a first-class citizen is a game changer for automating high-complexity workflows and building powerful tools for your team.

We see a future where a lot of people who aren't engineers have basic coding skills. We hope to give them a "default-right" environment where they can build real applications.

We have a free tier where you can build personal applications (what we're linking to today), but for those who want to use CloudWright in a work context, we have a paid offering called CloudWright Teams. With Teams, you can:

- Run flows in your own cloud VPC so that you can automate processes against your internal databases and services without opening your firewall

- Collaborate on automation scripts within a team

- Share tools you’ve built with co-workers as an easy-to-use form which tracks run history and results

We have full docs at docs.cloudwright.io, but we're also happy to answer questions here. We're really eager for feedback or suggestions, any comments are really welcome -- thanks in advance.

This looks really interesting!

As someone who's tried Zapier, IFTTT, Parabola, Actiondesk, Airtable, Unito and a few more tools whose names escape me right now, it's exciting to see a tool focusing on code as the way of stitching services together.

In my case I've been fed up and have ended up building a stitching service at each company and for my personal use, but I would have preferred a solution that saved from the initial setup and hassle.

I wasn't expecting the 'internal tools' aspect to come up as I read through the page -- I'm curious about that -- how does the intended use-case compare to something like Retool.io (which is also available on-prem)?

Thanks! To answer with respect to Retool directly, we actually wrote that up a bit here https://www.cloudwright.io/blog/retool-backend -- the short answer is, Retool is great for putting together UIs and database queries, but our focus is on the backend. One of the things we want is to make it easy to put together robust, lightweight APIs, with more complexity or connection requirements than you can embed in a frontend.

We also aim to be an easy way to set up scheduled or programmatic jobs -- stuff like scheduled file transfers or email notifications, where the primary interface isn't a web UI (when you aren't monitoring, developing, or debugging)

That makes perfect sense -- for a lot of the use-cases that I've experienced, I would have wanted to either hook the interface ('trigger button', 'view past runs' or similar) into an existing app or just iframe-d in your solution to that piece.

Sounds really interesting -- I think we'll give it a go.

I personally use Integromat which I find is a nice "in between" something simpler like Zapier and using code.

The ability to run code in my own infra is definitely a plus though, will give it a try.

I'm pretty taken with this project (especially if you can define APIs in some way such that they can auto-complete with integration into CloudWright). How can I get in touch to chat more?

Shoot me a note at ben@cloudwright.io and we can chat!

I'll probably give it a shot, interesting project.

Thanks! Please don't hesitate to reach out if you have questions, issues or feedback -- ben@cloudwright.io

Looks nice!

I'm working on something similar but without the pretty UI (built on top of https://cadenceworkflow.io/) - https://github.com/firdaus/cadence-python

Oh cool. I've heard good things about Cadence, mostly in the context of big-data pipelines.

Way off topic, but one of the projects I worked on at LiveRamp (before CloudWright) was our (originally internal) big-data workflow engine, which I did eventually OSS: https://github.com/liveRamp/workflow2/. It has a lot of overlap with Cadence, except in Java with a lot of native Hadoop features. Never built a community though, we didn't do a great job cultivating one.

I think there are a lot of niches in the low-code pipeline space, with regards to integrations, users, and interface. Good luck with the release!

I'll leave some feedback from the customer side...use or ignore as you wish.

I didn't read the announcement because I had a big popup forcing me to sign in. I'm not going to create an account to read a business announcement. It's a bad sign when someone in your business posts on another company's site - kind of like fastmail_support@yahoo.com.

I checked out your website to see if it's something I could potentially use. The modules are Google-heavy but there's nothing for Microsoft. My understanding is that a lot of businesses still use Microsoft.

Finally, $60/month might be a hard sell in a cost-cutting environment where companies are laying off workers and doing what they can to survive. I'll note that Zapier has a $20/month price point.

Thanks for the feedback, we appreciate it. I'm a little surprised that you got prompted to log into Medium. Obviously Medium isn't without faults, but I thought the anonymous viewer experience wasn't login-walled. I'll look into that.

We'll definitely be attentive to pricing constraints (esp given the current recession) and asks for Microsoft support -- thanks for the feedback.

If you can make this work with Microsoft’s Graph API, there’s about 100 little projects I’ve wanted to do to automate work stuff that I didn’t want to deal with hosting for. This might be the ticket!

We'll look into the MS Graph API and get back to you.

For dealing with standard REST APIs, we have a generic HTTP API wrapper module which you can use to wrap an endpoint with custom auth and give you back a Python requests session. It's not going to give you native Python bindings and autocomplete, but would let you integrate with the API.

Happy to talk in more depth about this -- feel free to email at ben@cloudwright.io.

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