In this article we'll walk through how to write some common automations using Airplane such as: writing Python and JavaScript automation scripts, generating reports using SQL, syncing data between sources, and customer onboarding.

Since our last changelog, we've rolled out universal search, added notifications to the Inbox, and rolled out faster task execution.

In this article, we'll discuss what QA automation is, why it's so useful, and some tips and tools that can help you get started with it.

In this article we'll walk through the basics of runbook automation and discuss how to use automation to make your runbooks actionable, accessible, accurate, authoritative, and adaptable.

In this article, we'll introduce DevOps automation and walk through six important DevOps automation techniques that can massively scale up your professional or personal projects.

We're excited to announce that Airplane is now HIPAA compliant! This week we rolled out Redshift and BigQuery support in addition to the ability to use JavaScript templates when defining environment variables for your task.

In this article we'll discuss six ways to leverage feature flags to boost productivity and walk through how to build a lightweight feature flag in under 5 minutes. What

This week we rolled out support for Microsoft SQL Server, the ability to manage task schedules via code, a new Examples gallery, and Environments GA.

In this article, we’ll first explore how to create a Django admin panel with basic functionality. Then, we’ll demonstrate some intermediate and advanced concepts — including how to customize your admin panels to manage product inventory and generate reports.

This article will cover twelve Python scripts that were selected for their general utility, ease of use, and positive impact on your workload. They range in complexity from easy to intermediate and focus on text processing and file management.

In this article, we'll walk through the high level of how to manage product releases across teams of different sizes. We'll cover product release lifecycles that are well-suited for small, medium, and even enterprise environments.

The most common of cron's issues (and the ones we'll cover in this article) include: system resource depletion, large dataset challenges, overlapping jobs, infrastructure changes, insufficient error handling, and scaling issues. We go into each of these in more detail in this article.

This week we rolled out the ability to execute sub-tasks with our Node SDK, made it easier to rerun entire sessions, and released a new Learn page.

Tech is going through a steep market correction right now. Companies are doing layoffs. Y Combinator published a letter to their founders telling them how to prepare for tough times ahead [https://twitter.com/refsrc/status/1527238287471292417]. Counterintuitively, this is a great time to start a new company–even better than in 2021 when tech was red-hot. I have friends who were considering starting a company this year, but are now feeling a bit skittish. This is the exact opposite of how you s

In this article we'll introduce cron and anacron, explore their similarities and differences, and walk through how to implement each.

It feels like a precarious time to join a tech startup. In the last few months, public market valuations of companies have come way down. The Bessemer cloud index [https://cloudindex.bvp.com/], which tracks average public SaaS company prices, shows that the total market cap of SaaS companies has been cut by more than half in the last few months. This has been going on for a few months, but in the last few weeks, reality seems to have hit startups all at once–the funding market has basically drie

This article walks through the most common reasons why your cron job isn't running: schedule errors, environmental changes, depleted resources, and overlapping jobs. We’ll also share some additional troubleshooting tips along with code samples to help get your cron jobs back up and running.

This week we introduced a new resource for Snowflake, released dynamic options for form blocks, and rolled out the ability to use configs in SQL and REST tasks.

There are a couple of ways you can create scheduled tasks in Docker using cron. In this article we'll walk through using the host's crontab, using cron within your containers, and separating cron from your application’s services. We'll also discuss scheduling tasks with Kubernetes.

Recently, I was looking at this graph of the number of weekly active users using Airplane [https://www.airplane.dev/] each week over the last few months of 2021: Y-axis omitted intentionallyTo me, it looks like boring, linear growth. We're adding roughly the same amount of new active users each week. But this was really surprising to me. I knew for a fact that we had a big inflection point in growth towards the end of September when a blog post of ours [https://blog.airplane.dev/i-started-a-sa

Airplane is excited to announce that we've completed our System and Organization Controls (SOC) 2 Type II audit.

In this article, we'll walk through the basics of feature toggles, some best practices when using them, and show you an example of how to manage feature flags with ease using Airplane, a developer tool for building internal apps.

This week we introduced a new schedules configuration UI, released Environments in beta, and introduced a schedules Pause/Resume button accessible from the Schedules page.

In this article we'll walk through how to schedule recurring tasks using cron jobs. We'll discuss crontab’s structure and syntax, real-life use cases, and some limitations. We'll also touch on alternatives to cron.

GitHub Actions are a way to automate tasks in your GitHub repository and are most commonly used to automate CI/CD workflows. In this article, we'll walk through how to leverage scheduled tasks in GitHub Actions and explore some of the limitations with the native functionality.

Tasks-as-code is now GA. You can create and define your Airplane tasks entirely in code. We've also included a quick preview of environments which are coming soon.

In this article, we'll walk through how to create cron jobs in Golang, set up a Golang project, and use the gocron and cron.v2 packages to schedule tasks.

In this article, we’ll walk through some troubleshooting steps including locating the cron job, validating the schedule, permissions, and more for determining the source of a cron job problem.

This week we rolled out transaction mode and support for RETURNING in Postgres is now live.

This week we rolled out a user profile page as a part of user settings and the ability to set start conditions on manual blocks.

This week we rolled out group admins and the ability to use JavaScript templates to supply an array of recipients in email blocks.

This week we released the Airplane API as a beta, added some new features to the Schedules page, and made some performance improvements.

Airplane was built to help companies operate safely and securely. In this post you'll find a list of product features that support security as well as a list of security-focused use cases.

This week we're introducing a beta of tasks-as-code that lets you create and define your Airplane tasks entirely in code. We've also included a quick preview of the Airplane API which is coming soon.

Along with the release of Deployments (beta) last week, we also rolled out a new and highly requested GitHub integration! We also rolled out a Schedules page to view and manage schedules centrally.

This week we rolled out the beta version of our new deployments feature. You can now version control, deploy, and manage Airplane tasks the same way you would your codebase.

This week we rolled out the ability to configure run constraints on agents, an enhanced Activity page, and custom install and post install build scripts for node tasks.

When you take a step back from the buzz of activities we generalize as work, you'll notice event patterns—repetitive processes. We can document most of these events and processes into easy-to-run steps in runbooks. Runbooks help make sure tasks are performed at the same level of accuracy and yield predictable and desired results. While runbooks tend to live in Google Docs or wiki pages, runbook automation is the process of using software to execute these more reliably, quickly, and autonomously

We often run into situations that require us to run a piece of code periodically—for example, renewing SSL certificates that may expire every year or two. Fortunately, most servers and operating systems provide some means to conduct repetitive tasks automatically. One popular solution is using cron.

You're now able to add tasks, runbooks, and folders to your favorites, deploy Airplane tasks automatically as you push code, and configure execution rules for tasks and runbooks.

One of the primary challenges that B2B healthcare, consumer health, and biotech companies face when it comes to finding third-party software solutions is that they don't comply with the level of sensitivity necessary to be able to use the software. This includes: * Measures to control and lock down PHI (Protected Health Information) and PII (Personally Identifiable Information) * Regular and rigorous audit logs that are easily accessible * The ability to manage permission groups at the mo

Every tech startup in the US incorporates as a Delaware C Corp with 10,000,000 shares of Common Stock at the date of founding. This is remarkably consistent–if you go through an accelerator like Y Combinator or Techstars, if you use the default options with Stripe Atlas or Clerky, or if you ask a tech law firm for advice, they'll all point you in the same direction. Incorporating in Delaware and as a C Corp are pretty well understood and well explained on the internet, but why 10 million shares

This week we released a MongoDB database resource, added a team developer role, and rolled out onboarding support.

Today, we're announcing our Series A and the public launch of Airplane runbooks—a developer platform for automating internal workflows.

This week we rolled out SAML SSO and directory sync both available to enterprise customers, added manual blocks, and released a new collapsible UI for building runbooks.

This week we rolled out runbook schedules, released Slack notifications for failed sessions and for sessions waiting on manual inputs, and added the ability to use block inputs in JavaScript templates.

This week we rolled out folders, added resources for messaging, and launched new and improved documentation with a tutorials library.

I often get questions from founders about how they should think about the “technical moat” of what they’re building, or from potential employees about our technical moat at Heap. If you have a successful product, what’s to stop someone else from building it? Technical moats exist, but they rarely take the form people expect them to take. People often look for an answer to that question in the form of a monolithic, singular technology, like a single algorithm, or a particular piece of code nobo

Building a product that interacts with financial systems and institutions tends to require a number of manual operational workflows. As a result, fintech and insurtech companies invest a significant amount of engineering effort into building internal workflows and processes for support, ops, risk, compliance, and other teams. This is why these companies often dedicate some percentage of their headcount to developing internal tools. One challenge is building internal tools while accounting for s

This week we launched our new product Runbooks, enabled paginated logs to be downloaded as CSV files, shipped task cloning, and rolled out a new website.

One of the first things that a scaling startup builds as soon as they have a reasonable amount of customer volume is an admin panel, sometimes called an admin dashboard or control center. From here, people on support, customer success, ops, and other teams can read and write customer data to help resolve customer issues. Examples of the types of things you might need to do in an admin panel: * Read data: Lookup a user's metadata and transaction history; see a list of users on a team * Sim

Airplane enables engineers at SaaS companies to focus on doing the thing they do best: building a great product. With Airplane, you can move quickly by transforming code into enterprise-grade internal apps in minutes that can be used by anyone on your team. Why SaaS companies choose Airplane SaaS companies are able to grow more quickly when developers can fully focus on building the company's core offering. Airplane enables this by: * Enabling non-engineers to safely run operations that were

Engineering teams tend to prioritize customer-facing features over internal tools. As a result, the state of internal tools in most companies–especially fast-growing startups–lags far behind where it would be in an ideal world. But there's a solution: why not just let the support or ops team build their own tools? There's tons of no-code vendors out there that promise exactly this. However, unless approached correctly, this won't work. Before diving in, I want to clarify that the primary reaso

Many Airplane users run tasks integrated with their production systems, and the overwhelming majority of users run their production systems on AWS. In this post, we'll walk through how you can easily integrate the two together! Via Self-Hosted AWS Agents With Airplane, you can self-host agents [https://docs.airplane.dev/platform/agent-installation] to run within your own AWS account / AWS VPC. This gives you the most flexibility: Airplane agents can run within your own private network(s), and y

This article is not about compliance requirements, RBAC, SSO, etc. If you're interested in that, check out EnterpriseReady.io. However, having every box checked on that website still won't result in a high-quality enterprise product.

In December 2020, Josh Ma and I started our startup, Airplane. Before that, we spent several months exploring ideas before settling on the idea that eventually became Airplane.

In 2013, I co-founded Heap, a product analytics company that I helped grow to over 200 people and $X0,000,000 in ARR before I left in 2020. In 2021, I co-founded Airplane, a developer platform for quickly creating internal tools.

A lot of Airplane users wonder how we're different from Retool–are Airplane and Retool competitors? Complementary? Here's our take. TLDR: both tools excel in different ways, and plenty of companies use both Retool and Airplane as complements. But there are also a few areas of overlap.

At Airplane, we recently exited our free early access period and started charging for our product. I thought it'd be helpful to write a post talking through the logic behind our pricing model, partially as an explanation for our customers, but also as a data point for other early-stage B2B SaaS businesses. Prior to Airplane, I also spent 7 years at my previous startup Heap [https://heap.io/] iterating several times on pricing. What are you optimizing for? It might seem obvious that the point of

Here at Airplane, we get asked often about the differences between Airplane and Rundeck. We thought we'd give our take. We're obviously biased towards our approach, but we started building Airplane in part due to some of the needs we had that existing tools, like Rundeck, didn't meet.

We've made a ton of progress in the last few weeks. Here's a quick rundown of everything that's changed in Airplane. SOC 2 Compliance We're now SOC 2 compliant! We're proud to announce that we successfully achieved compliance and received an Auditor’s Report demonstrating that our policies, procedures, and infrastructure meet or exceed the SOC 2 criteria. Learn more here [https://airplane.ghost.io/airplane-has-completed-our-soc-2-type-i-audit/]. Select Options (aka "Dropdowns") You can now cre

At Airplane, as of this week, we've completed our System and Organization Controls (SOC) 2 Type I audit. For the entire time that we've had customers using our product, we've taken industry-standard security practices.

Replace brittle cron jobs with easy-to-use scheduled Airplane tasks.

Today we're publicly launching Airplane, a platform that lets engineers quickly create lightweight internal apps for their teammates. We've been in closed beta for the last 6 months, but as of today, Airplane is open for anyone to sign up and try out [https://www.airplane.dev/]. Why existing approaches to internal tools fall short My co-founder Josh and I both spent the last 7+ years at two different SaaS companies.  I previously co-founded Heap, an analytics company, and Josh was CTO at Benchl

Airplane will be available soon. Send us a note at hello@airplane.dev to get early access.