Show HN: Kumologica – Low-Code Integration Toolkit for Serverless Compute | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Kumologica – Low-Code Integration Toolkit for Serverless Compute

kumologica.com

49 pointsjaviert21 comments

Something that I have found when using graphical programming (by connecting nodes) (My experience with this is with Houdini for VFX) is that some developers do take to it and are comfortable either wayq (hence able to share setups with less-technical peers) but others will immediately swap to the (usually available) write-code context, and it's very hard to fault them for it. It's an interesting thing to expect developers to be able to cope with! Maybe even more of an ask than learning a new language?

> using graphical programming (by connecting nodes)

I use Octane Render [0] whose materials editor is based on graphically connecting nodes which might be materials (diffuse, specular, etc), image files, mappings, colours, procedurals, emitters and many more. Compared with conventional languages the Octane shader language lacks any sort of conditional or iterative constructs, which obviously simplifies the 'programming' required.

I'm happy with graphical node editing for this shader use case. However, I sometimes really miss the ability to do a global textual search and replace across multiple materials, e.g. to change the file name of a normal map that is used in a node in multiple materials. I suspect that there would be similar frustrations when maintaining and updating a complex system configuration using a 'no-code' node-based mechanism.

[0] https://home.otoy.com/render/octane-render/

Have you played around with octane script nodes for the use cases above? They should allow you to do almost anything in the node graph through Lua (or native code via ffi) - Jules

Thanks for this great reply, and sorry for lack of response!

I should have been more precise - I was actually referring to the Octane plug-in for Daz Studio, where I don't think script nodes are available.

I really enjoy nodes for tasks that require immediate visual or audio feedback - making shaders in Blender, designing waveforms in Max, etc. But there are tasks that I find dead simple when done with code, such as translating a math formula into an algorithm or parsing data, that become non-trivial to figure out in those same systems.

This is amazing. Pretty much what I've done with Step Functions and deployed using Pulumi - rolled into one, with a graphical UI.

Taking it for a spin.

That is - I would if there was a Linux build or usable source code available..

Early days, I get it. If I find a way to run it on Linux will post here.

Spot on . Seems like the tool chained everything under the hood with a graphical UI . And looks beyond step function.

I'd love to give this a try, but there are no Linux binaries available despite being electron based. Is this on your roadmap?

Thanks for your feedback. We are working on a linux build atm. If you are interested to be part of the beta testing for linux just drop us a line on: https://kumologica.com/contact.html.

Maybe I should dive more into it, but everytime I read a project that claims to be "serverless" I have a really hard time to understand what it actually does or solves.

What is serverless about? Is it the next big thing? Or just the new buzzword?

"Serverless computing is a cloud computing execution model in which the cloud provider runs the server, and dynamically manages the allocation of machine resources. Pricing is based on the actual amount of resources consumed by an application, rather than on pre-purchased units of capacity. "

From Wikipedia, first result when googling. Don't be lazy.

That's not the main pitch, that's the standard dynamic cloud/container hosting claim, this is their pitch:

"Software is eating the world. Unfortunately, most businesses still can't deliver software successfully, much less do so at the pace needed to stay competitive. For those who wish to keep up, let alone lead, software delivery & operation must be radically simplified."

Just think of it as a function on demand. Call an API endpoint, a container spins up and does something, returns the result and shuts down, and you only pay for the milliseconds and RAM used in that amount of time.

I think of it as "zero ops" API endpoints. I have some serverless functions deployed on Vercel. I wrote some Typescript code, pushed it to a file in a directory called api/. Now every time I call my function endpoint, the function runs and returns my result. I don't have to provision anything or set up any ops. The serverless part takes care of spinning up whatever compute it needs, runs my code fully statelessly, and returns my result. I don't have to touch or think about scaling anything. I'm a developer who wants to spend time on features and code, and remove myself from the dev ops as much as possible. That's why I love serverless and use it whenever I can.

Thanks, still curious about data management, vendor lock in, what to do when complexity grows etc. Im sure they have all been thought off, will look into it.

Narrator voice: “It had not all been thought of.”

As for vendor lock in, I think that is one of the bigger constraints with serverless. There are a couple tools that help make the transition easier, like Serverless Framework[0], but when you get into things like AWS Dynamo DB, which seems to be there perfered DB for serverless workloads, it can get tricky. Thankfully, it seems like the format of basic serverless functions is pretty standard across different platforms, but I think the real tricky part comes from other services on the platform you use, like data persistence.

[0] https://www.serverless.com/

Came across this link and found it awesome at first look. Has great potential, keep this up. Just downloaded Mac version and testing. Have a few feedback’s already, do you have a link where I can share feedback

https://kumologica.com/contact.html. You can share your feed back through the contact page link give above

Interesting tool. A low code approach to lambda.

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