Stories

Launch HN: Airbyte (YC W20) – Open-Source ELT (Fivetran/Stitch Alternative)

Article news.ycombinator.com

Launch HN: Airbyte (YC W20) – Open-Source ELT (Fivetran/Stitch Alternative)

Hi HN!

Michel here with John, Shrif, Jared, Charles, and Chris. We are building an open-source ELT platform that replicates data from any applications, APIs, databases, etc. into your data warehouses, data lakes or databases: https://airbyte.io.

I’ve been in data engineering for 11 years. Before Airbyte, I was the head of integrations at Liveramp, where we built and scaled over 1,000 data ingestion connectors to replicate 100TB worth of data every day. John, on the other end, has already built 3 startups with 2 exits. His latest one didn’t work out, though. He spent almost a year building ETL pipelines for an engineering management platform, but he eventually ran out of money before reaching product-market fit.

By late 2019, we had known each other for 7 years, and always wanted to work together. When John’s third startup shut down, it was finally the right timing for both of us. And we knew which problem we wanted to address: data integration, and ELT more specifically.

We started interviewing Fivetran, Stitchdata, and Matillion’s customers, in order to see if the existing solutions were solving their problems. We learned they all fell short, and always with the same patterns.

Some limitations we identified are due to the fact that they are closed source. This prevents them from addressing the long tail of integrations because they will always have a ROI consideration when building and maintaining new connectors. A good example is Fivetran which, after 8 years, offers around 150 connectors. This is not a lot when you look at the number of existing tools out there (more than 10,000). In fact, all their customers that we talked to are building and maintaining their own connectors (along with orchestration, scheduling, monitoring, etc.) in-house, as the connectors they needed were either not supported in the way they needed or not supported at all.

Some of those customers also tried to leverage existing open-source solutions, but the quality of the existing connectors is inconsistent, as many haven't been updated in years. Plus, they are not usable out of the box.

That’s when we knew we wanted Airbyte to be open-source (MIT license), usable out of the box, and cover the long tail of integrations. By making it trivial to build new connectors on Airbyte in any language (they run as Docker containers), we hope the community will help us build and maintain the long tail of connectors. While open-source also enables us to address all use cases (including internal DBs and APIs), it also allows us to solve the problem inherent to cloud-based solutions: the security and privacy of your data. Companies don’t need to trust yet another 3rd-party vendor. Because it is self-hosted, it will disrupt the pricing of existing solutions.

Here’s a 2-minute demo video if you want to check out how it looks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKDviQrOAbU

Airbyte can run on a single node without any external infrastructure. We also integrate with Kubernetes (alpha), and will soon integrate with Airflow so you can run replication tasks across your cluster.

Today, our early version supports about 41 sources and 6 destinations (https://docs.airbyte.io/integrations/destinations). We’re releasing new connectors (https://docs.airbyte.io/changelog/connectors) every week (6 of them have already been contributed by the community). We bootstrapped some connectors using the highest-quality ones from Singer. Our connectors will always remain open-source.

Our goal is to solve data integration for as many companies as possible, and the success of Airbyte is predicated on the open-source project becoming loved and ubiquitous. For this reason, we will focus the entirety of 2021 strengthening the open-source edition; we are dedicated to making it amazing for all users. We will eventually create a paid edition (open core model) with enterprise-level features (support, SLA, hosting and management, privacy compliance, role and access management, SSO, etc.) to address the needs of our most demanding users.

Give it a spin: https://github.com/airbytehq/airbyte/ & https://demo.airbyte.io. Let us know what you think. This is our first time building an open-source technology, so we know we have a lot to learn!

Discussion 87 comments · 178 points · mtricot · 2021-01-26
Open on HN
Loading the discussion…

Domain filters

Stories from these domains are hidden from every list. Subdomains match too: blocking substack.com also hides danluu.substack.com.

    New collection

    Delete this collection?

    About YAVCHN

    YAVCHN is a reader for Hacker News and Lobsters, with articles and discussions in separate windows or Classic pages.

    Created by Paul Parks and built with PUDL.

    YAVCHN source code on GitHub

    Privacy policy · Terms of use

    Help

    Keyboard

    j / k
    Move down and up the story list. The arrow keys scroll whatever has focus.
    Enter
    Read the marked story in the article reader.
    ]
    Read the next story in the same article-reader applet. Back returns to the previous story.
    p
    Pin or unpin the marked story, which keeps it in Pinned.
    n / N
    Move to the next or previous top-level comment in the window in front.
    c
    Collapse or expand that comment.
    f
    Hide or show the story list.
    Esc
    Close a menu or this help.
    Access key m
    Go to the menu bar. Most browsers take it with Alt on Windows and Linux, and Safari with Control and Option.
    ?
    Show this help.

    Windows

    Each story opens in a window holding its article above its discussion; drag the bar between them to share the room differently. A window can be moved by its title bar, resized from any edge, snapped to a half or a corner by dragging it there, maximised, or minimised to the bar at the foot of the page. Use Window > New reader window to open an empty reader, or Story > Open in new reader window to open another reader for the current article. Docked readers keep their articles when you select another story from the sidebar. Minimized readers can be restored and reused for their site. A window's Next story link reads on down the list in the same window.

    A link in a comment or an article to another Hacker News or Lobsters thread opens that thread in a window too. A link to a single HN comment opens the comment above its replies.

    While a story's window is in front, the Story and Discussion menus in the menu bar hold its commands: pinning, Next story, sorting, collapsing every thread, jumping to the first new comment. Each window also remembers where you were in its article and discussion, so a reload, or Back to a story that Next took you past, finds your place again. Closing a window forgets it.

    The whole arrangement lives in the address, so a bookmark or a shared link brings it back, and Back undoes the last change. Moving between Hacker News, Lobsters, their lists, Pinned and Find changes only the list, and leaves the windows open.

    The list

    The pin at the start of a row keeps the story in Pinned, and the cross at its end hides it. Pinned can be narrowed by words in the title, site or author, by source, and to the stories you haven't opened yet, and ordered by when you pinned them, by points or by comments; the filters are part of the address, so a filtered view can be bookmarked. Scroll past the end of the list to load more. Domain filters, in the View menu, hide every story from a site.

    Collections are named lists of stories. Story > Add to collection files the story in front into one or more of them, and the Collections feed shows them all or one at a time; the menu that chooses collections also creates, renames, and deletes them. A note is your own text on a story. Choose Add note in a story's toolbar to write one; it saves as you type. Rows with a note carry the note mark, and the Notes feed lists every noted story and searches the text of your notes.

    Browsing view

    View > Windowed and View > Classic select the browsing view and save your default in this browser. Window view reuses a reader for each feed. Classic view opens stories and applets as pages. Open as a page is a one-off action that does not change your saved default. Use the Windowed selector to return an article to a window. Direct page links always open as pages.

    Applets

    The Applets menu in the menu bar holds three tools, each a window of its own. Replies to me takes your Hacker News user name and lists the replies to your last thirty comments and stories, checking again every three minutes while it is open, and marking what is new since you last marked them read. Look up a user opens a profile on Hacker News or Lobsters, with their submissions and recent comments, as a commenter's name in any discussion does; the bar at the top of a profile looks up someone else in the same window, and Back returns to the one before. Who is hiring? filters the posts of HN's monthly hiring threads by the words you type.

    They read only what the sites publish to everyone, so none of them asks for a login, and your user name stays in this browser anonymously and is included in retained applet state when signed in.

    Find

    Find takes any link and lists every time it was submitted to Hacker News and Lobsters, so you can read each discussion of it.

    About

    YAVCHN never sees your Hacker News or Lobsters login. The discussion is fetched from each site's public API; to vote or reply, follow the link above the discussion, or the arrow beside a comment, to the source's own site. Without a YAVCHN account, your data stays in this browser. When signed in, pins, collections, notes, blocked domains, and retained reading state are stored with your account and synchronized across devices. Hidden stories and layout stay in this browser. The privacy policy has the details.

    Open source: github.com/paulmooreparks/yavchn. Built with PUDL.