| I used to work for an automation company that produced a product called ActiveBatch. It was such an amazing tool for just drag and drop automation. Its focus was on full fledged workflow automation and not just data orchestration. What I loved was its simplicity + its out of the box features. To set it up just took a simple MS SQL DB + An Installer. Bam you are up and running an absolute rock solid scheduler(i've seen million+ jobs running on it without it breaking a sweat). Then you could install (or use it to deploy) execution agents to all the servers you wanted as workers. It also installed a robust Desktop GUI that had so many services built in ready to go (anything from executing scripts all the way to performing direct actions against countless products a company would have or against various cloud services). There were so many pre built actions where all you had to do was input credentials and it would enumerate the appropriate properties from that service automatically. Then you could connect things together (ie, pull something from the cloud, process it on some other server, store it, pass it along to another service, whatever you wanted) Only problem was this is very much a B2B application and their sales is really only interested in selling to enterprises and not end users. I really wish we had something like this that regular people could download. Everything ive seen listed here requires extensive setup,requires coding, or does not have a robust desktop GUI but instead some half baked web gui which might require dropping back down to scripts/coding. You could set up hundreds/thousands of automated steps in ActiveBatch without writing a single line of code. I miss that product. |
Mind you, it might have been just culture at that place, but I don't think this is as good of an example as you make it be. Sure, it was easy to get started and made the life easier at the beginning, but running it at scale was not in any way easy.