Show HN: Strada – Cloud IDE for Connecting SaaS APIs

Hi HN! I’m Arash, one of the founders of Strada (https://www.getstrada.com), a cloud IDE for building automation workflows across your company’s SaaS apps. Strada handles integrations, triggers, infrastructure and observability while letting you write core workflow logic in Python (more languages soon). It's for teams that hit limitations with low-code tools while building with internal apps — eg. Zendesk, Jira, Salesforce, Slack. You can access our docs at (https://docs.getstrada.com).

While working on our first product (a unified accounting API), we learned that as companies grow, their integration teams become more technical but typically still use low-code tools. We also observed that as LLMs are becoming popular, these teams (usually outside of engineering) are adopting more code. For example, we spoke with multiple companies that generate integration code with an LLM and use it in their low-code platform.

Unfortunately, most integration tools are not designed with code as a first-class citizen. They often have limited support for external libraries, restrict how variables are used, and limit how code blocks interact with other workflow steps. But integration developers put up with them because stitching together authentication, scripts, APIs, infrastructure, and observability is time consuming and not a core focus for their teams.

Instead of drag-and-drop blocks, we chose code as the main interface. Tasks that are frustrating in low-code tools become simple with code: conditional logic with layers of branching, complex transformations, or problems that an external library already solves (for example, redacting personally identifiable information with the scrubadub library [1]). Each Strada workflow is a contiguous Python script, and every action configured in the UI can be invoked like a function. We started with Python since it’s popular with teams outside of engineering, like IT, Data, and Ops.

Our goal is to help integration builders focus on logic unique to their business by simplifying everything outside of that: - Integrations: we handle authentication and provide abstractions for common app actions; - Triggers: workflows can be triggered by a webhook or run on a schedule; - Infrastructure: one-click deployment with automatic scaling; - Observability: detailed logging of workflow actions, payloads, and errors.

Today, customers use Strada for workflows like Customer Support (receive Zendesk ticket webhook, remove sensitive information, perform sentiment analysis using OpenAI, and escalate problematic tickets) and Customer Onboarding (receive webhook with new customer data & files, transform to expected format, send request to third-party API, send request to internal endpoint).

What we're currently working on: - More enterprise app integrations; - A self-hosting option; - More runtimes in addition to Python; - AI for code generation.

We’re excited for you to try it and share your feedback!

[1] https://github.com/LeapBeyond/scrubadub

getstrada.com

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79 points

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arash-khazaei

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a year ago

29 comments

rubenfiszel ・ a year ago

Look very similar to the script builder portion of https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill, but not open-source, not self-hostable, without open-source integrations (https://hub.windmill.dev/) and without a workflow engine

disclaimer: I'm founder of ^

  • arash-khazaei ・ a year ago

    Windmill looks cool and you guys have built a lot! Our focus is more on enterprise integrations for teams typically outside of engineering - we will continue building with this focus in mind.

    At the end of the day we care about our customers and want them to solve their problems with whichever tools best suit their needs. We are on mission to build our version, but this isn’t a zero-sum game.

  • windexh8er ・ a year ago

    Thank you for Windmill! I've used it in the last two startups I've been at and it is fantastic.

xwowsersx ・ a year ago

> Code as a first-class citizen > Write your workflows in Python, import any package, and version control with Git.

I think this is the winning feature. The issue with Low-code/No-code, as many engineers acknowledge, is that they tend to be utilized for tasks better suited for coding. Companies are attracted to the notion that designers, PMs, or others can independently create tools and conserve engineering resources. However, these tools often exceed the capabilities of LC/NC, resulting in an unmanageable complexity. In reality, code proves effective for constructing large, intricate systems — or at least has a fighting chance where LC/NC falls short. Anyways, all of this is to say that code as a first-class citizen + source control is a big win here.

  • arash-khazaei ・ a year ago

    Thanks - this was one of the main inspirations for building Strada! We had many conversations with integration developers and when we asked to see their workflows, we saw a lot of complexity in their low-code platforms that could have been made simpler with a more code-first approach.

    One particular conversation that stood out was a developer that had to chain 6 layers of low-code blocks, just to flatten a JSON response. In this case he wished that he could write a simple recursive function to solve the same task.

yodon ・ a year ago

I've been waiting for someone to build this (or build what I think this is). A couple questions:

Do you handle retry on failure and exponential backoff on rate limiting? (I'm hoping the answer to both of these is yes.)

Do I have to worry about rate limiting my calls to your platform, and if so do I have to rate limit them at your rate limit or the 3rd party's rate limit or ? (I'm hoping the answer to this is within reason I don't have to worry about rate limits, you just queue up my calls and forward them at the right rate.)

Is there a way inside the custom Python code to make an arbitrary 3rd party endpoint look idempotent to outside callers? (Hoping for this to be yes.)

  • arash-khazaei ・ a year ago

    1. Currently, we expose the status of actions (success/failure boolean), plus any additional metadata (status code, any http response header) so that you can retry (that's the nice thing about it being fully in Python - an `if` or `for` loop is easy to write). We are working on allowing you to configure the retry mechanism within the action, so we handle it on your behalf. However, for now we didn't want to be too prescriptive on what should happen on failure.

    2. You do not have to worry about rate limiting calls to our service. We enqueue each request and respond with a HTTP status `201`, and our worker cluster will start processing the job. Within the workflow, 3rd party API calls can be rate limited, but for now we leave that to the discretion of the workflow author (see 1.)

    3. I may need a bit of clarification on this one. Is the question whether you can provide idempotency key when making a request to a 3rd party endpoint? If so, yes you can. We have simple abstractions of common actions (for example sending a message in slack, or creating contact). However, you can always build your own custom action that sits on top of the underlying HTTP request, and therefore you can pass any additional parameter (idempotency key) in this case.

    • yodon ・ a year ago

      This sounds great - very sensible answers for an early stage product.

      Re: your mention elsewhere of adding language support beyond Python, I'll call out C# (first choice) and/or Typescript (2nd choice) as my personal favorite votes.

QuinnyPig ・ a year ago

I really like where you split the difference between “no code” and “you’d best be a decent developer to use this.”

  • arash-khazaei ・ a year ago

    I appreciate it - it is an important distinction!

xtiansimon ・ a year ago

What’s the landscape of solutions here—is this made for a specific context of APIs, like connecting all of “your company’s” email and messaging APIs? Or, is it something like—if it has an API, we will connect to it…?

Asking because I have a client who is using a Sales POS that has an API, and we’re trying to integrate it with another service’s API that does Accounts Payable. Company2 has not implemented all features of Company1’s API and Company2 says, “that feature is not supported”.

Of course, the Company1 product is already configured and running. Company2’s _minimum implementation_ of Company1’s API de facto restricts how Company1’s product can be configured. Who would have imagined that?!

So I’m asking myself, is there even a market for a third-party to connect these two platforms? And how would that work if these two parties are not working together, why would either work with yet another third-party? What’s the landscape here; what do I look for? Are there generic API middlemen? Or do they only provide integration within certain contexts or industries or channels. How is the market divided up?

  • arash-khazaei ・ a year ago

    > is this made for a specific context of APIs, like connecting all of “your company’s” email and messaging APIs?

    Correct - our product is for connecting your internal systems.

    If I understood the problem correctly, your client can choose not to rely on the "minimum implementation" Company 2 has built to connect to Company 1. Instead if it is possible, your client could use our platform to directly build a better integration between Company 2 and Company 1. Of course, we would need to understand the specifics, but in general our product can be used to build whatever business logic is necessary to connect systems within an organization/company.

    Happy to chat more specifics if you reach out to founders at getstrada.com

nathanwallace ・ a year ago

Readers may also enjoy Flowpipe [1], a cloud scripting engine to build workflow pipelines using HCL (like Terraform). It's as-code, self-hosted and open source. Our design choices were a bit different - focus on DevSecOps, composable OSS mods [2], first-class support for retries etc [3], and the flexibility to run function code or containers when required [4].

1 - https://github.com/turbot/flowpipe 2 - https://hub.flowpipe.io 3 - https://flowpipe.io/docs/flowpipe-hcl/step#retry 4 - https://flowpipe.io/docs/flowpipe-hcl/step/function

bdcravens ・ a year ago

Any worries naming it the same as https://strada.hotwired.dev/? I realize they aren't related problem spaces, but naming collisions still aren't ideal.

  • arash-khazaei ・ a year ago

    We've grown attached to "Strada", so for now no plans on changing.

    I do have friends/colleagues forward me the occasional DHH tweet from time to time, whenever he mentions Strada :)

andreashansen ・ a year ago

The last few months we've seen the fall- or acquisitions of services such as internal.io, dynaboard.com, Uiflow, AWS honeycode, Disha, Skuid, spreadsheet.com[], and some low-code BaaS I don't recall the name of.

Where do you see yourselves compared to these services? I think businesses and devs grow ever-more considerate of the non-(F)OSS services they use.

[]not the same, but they have no-code as one of their main selling points

joshmanders ・ a year ago

Some landing page nitpicks:

- Your video opens up in 25% smaller window than the screenshot, which is weird, only way for me to really see whats going on in the video is by making it full screen, on a 27-inch 4k display where now it's just too large.

- I don't know if you're just talking that fast or you sped up the video, but I had to for the first time in my life change the speed of a video to 0.75x just to understand what you were saying.

  • arash-khazaei ・ a year ago

    Thanks for the feedback!

    - We'll take look to address this.

    - We actually did slightly speed up the video. We will re-upload the video with the original speed. Thanks for calling this out!

    • joshmanders ・ a year ago

      It's a common thing I'm noticing about videos from technical people on their products. They're so intimately familiar with the product (obviously because they made it) that they just fly through everything because they just assume that the viewer already understands the product. We don't.

klysm ・ a year ago

Every time I see something like this, my brain fills with all the difficulties of database replication and how it's almost certainly intractable to do with whatever half-baked API a SaaS tool has given you. It feels doomed and misguided

yrcyrc ・ a year ago

Love the idea and will take a look!! One nitpick: the delivery is way too fast on the video. Can barely follow what he says. But I got it in the end.

  • arash-khazaei ・ a year ago

    Thanks! We got feedback on the speed (we had sped it up) and reset it to the original speed, but it seems it still may be too fast.

    We are going to record a slower, more in-depth video and host it on our docs.

Soerensen ・ a year ago

This is super cool! I've often been frustrated with the lack of complexity that NC/LC solutions offer. Look forward to playing around with Strada!