p/airplane The developer platform for business software

Runbooks by Airplane - Transform scripts, SQL, and more into internal workflows

Airplane

•

3yr ago

Airplane Runbooks make it easy to turn small amounts of code into complex internal workflows. Model onboarding flows, admin operations, cron-like schedules and more and share with your team. It's like Zapier but for first-party operations that touch prod data.

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Ravi Parikh

Airplane

Maker

👋 Hey Product Hunt, great to meet you again! My co-founder Josh and I publicly launched Airplane on Product Hunt in July, and thanks to all the incredible feedback we've received from this community, we're here today launching our newest product: Runbooks for multi-step operations. Airplane is still the simplest, fastest way for engineers to create new internal tools. When we previously launched Airplane a few months ago, our platform let you turn scripts, SQL queries, or REST endpoints into lightweight, single-function apps that anyone can use (called "Tasks"). A task might be something like "delete a user" or "issue a refund" or "unban account." Now, Runbooks let you take multiple tasks and stitch them together into powerful multi-step workflows. These can be simple (e.g. "delete a user, then email that user an archive containing their data") or more complex (e.g. "20 step customer onboarding flow"). ✈️ Why people use Airplane today At my previous company Heap, and my co-founder's previous company Benchling, we noticed that there were tons of engineering-only operations encapsulated as scripts or saved database queries. Engineers were constantly being pinged to run these operations on behalf of people on support, success, ops, and other teams. Airplane makes it incredibly fast for any engineer to take an eng-only operation and turn it into a shareable, safe internal app that non-engineers can use. Our customers have mentioned a few reasons why they love Airplane: - Limits the level of interruptions that developers experience - Enables non-engineers to safely run operations that were previously engineering-only - Eliminates the time that developers spend on running recurring eng-heavy operations and managing infra for internal tools - Adds granular permissions, audit logs, and approval flows to sensitive operations - It's an easy, maintenance-free substitute for cron or other schedulers 📓 Why we built Runbooks: multi-step workflows While supporting individual operations is useful, we got a lot of feedback and observed behavior from our customers that led us to building runbooks. We'd frequently observe things like: - Users would create an Airplane task to "extend a user's free trial" but they'd first need to look up the user's details in order to execute it. It felt natural to have these two functions in one place to pass data from one step to the other. Runbooks lets you assemble simple two-step read and write workflows like this. You can now look up a user's details and then automatically use that output in a subsequent step to extend the user's free trial. - People wanted more control over how they were notified after a task ran. We'd hear feedback like, "I want to get a Slack or email containing the output of a task, but only if the output meets certain criteria." We support embedding Slack and email steps in runbooks and allow conditional logic that lets you tailor these notifications how you want. - Users would have Notion or Google docs with multi-step flows written out, and several of the steps were just things like, "go to Airplane and run task XYZ." Instead of having to follow a doc (and potentially making mistakes or omitting steps), runbooks let you model that entire workflow in one place. In addition to runbooks, we've added a number of new features since the initial launch in July: schedules, SAML SSO and directory sync, enhanced notifications, new integrations, and more. Your feedback has been instrumental in shaping and helping make the product even better. Please share any thoughts, questions, comments - we'd love to hear what you think!