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

👋 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!

Wow! Looks great!🚀

Even as a non-developer, I loved using Airplane. I had some Python scripts that I wanted to run periodically. Instead of asking the DevOps team to provide me with a small server, configuring and maintaining the server, I just created a couple of tasks on Airplane, and never looked back. ✌️ I believe the Runbooks feature would make more complex operations even easier. Would love to test it soon!

Congrats on the launch!

Hey team @ Airplane! 👋 Huge congrats on the launch!

We are using Airplane to handle recurring data deletion for specific customers that need it - a runbook makes this easy and is saving us on the engineering team valuable time while we scope out our data retention policy feature. Huge fans here!

great will explore this

It is great. I will explore this.

Hmm, interesting

Congrats on the launch!