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.
Comments
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.