Introducing Connect: Run low-latency Inngest Functions on servers

While Inngest has been primarly successful among Serverless developers, we've seen a growing demand from developers running Inngest Functions on their long-running servers such as Render, AWS EC2, DigitalOcean and such. Additionally, some customers scaling large applications with Inngest were also looking for a lower latency and better support for long-running functions.

After a few weeks of private alpha, we are happy to rollout Connect as a Developer Preview in our TypeScript, Python and Go SDKs.

Connect is drop-in replacement to serve() to connect your application to Inngest over one or multiple outbound persistent connections, dramatically improving the latency and scalability of your functions.

This new deployment method relying the WebSocket protocol brings:

Connect

Lower latency - No need for multiple HTTP requests to Inngest to process a single function.
Elastic horizontal scaling - Easily add more capacity by running additional workers.
Ideal for container runtimes - Deploy on Kubernetes or ECS without the need of a load balancer for inbound traffic
Simpler long running steps - Step execution is not bound by platform http timeouts.

Beyond huge performance and scalability benefit, Connect also brings a better developer experience, enabling colocate all your Inngest-related code in a single file:

import { Inngest } from 'inngest'
import { connect } from 'inngest/connect';
import { ConnectionState } from 'inngest/components/connect/types';

const inngest = new Inngest({
  id: 'my-app'
});

const handleSignupFunction = inngest.createFunction(
  { id: 'handle-signup' },
  { event: 'user.created'}
  async ({ event, step }) => {
    console.log('Function called', event);
  }
);

(async () => {
  const connection = await connect({
    apps: [{ client: inngest, functions: [handleSignupFunction] }]
  });

  console.log('Worker: connected', connection);
})();

Find examples in Go and Python in the Connect documentation page

Once your application deployed using Connect, each active connection get listed as workers in the Inngest Platform, bringing you full visibility on your application health and load:

Cloud App Workers

Beyond observability, Connect also brings a finer control over production deployments with supports for rollbacks, rolling releases and more.

Get started with Connect

If your application is running on servers, or if you are looking for a finer horizontal scaling control or lower latency, give Connect a try and share your feedback during our developer preview!

The Connect documentation will drive you from setup to advanced deployment configuration 🚀