How Hatchet Keeps Background Tasks from Ruining Your Day
- Founders
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Alexander Belanger
Gabriel Ruttner
Running data pipelines and background tasks at scale shouldn't drive you crazy. Alexander Belanger and Gabriel Ruttner built Hatchet to make sure it doesn't.
Managing background tasks sounds easy – until you hit unexpected timeouts or realize your supposedly reliable queue just dropped something critical. After navigating these headaches firsthand at Porter and Oneleet, the team knew it could be done better. So they conceived Hatchet: a high-throughput, low-latency, open-source computing service designed specifically to handle background tasks without dropping a beat (or a task).
Timeout Limits? That's Cute
Hatchet's lean team didn't want to waste time wrestling with rigid timeout rules and other "serverless" limitations. Instead, they opted for long-lived gRPC connections and genuinely stateful containers. Fly's Machines infrastructure made this straightforward and robust, ensuring tasks run smooth as butter.
Worker Pools Done Swimmingly
Hatchet scales smoothly to tackle as many tasks as needed. Users can easily set up standby pools of Fly Machine workers, ready to scale from zero to many on a moment's notice – in more regions than the cheese section at Whole Foods.
Fly's Machines API streamlines all of this for Alexander and the Hatchet team, with smooth multi-region deployments, straightforward documentation, and hassle-free network isolation. Alexander said it was almost as if "…the Machines API was made just for us – it fits like a glove."
Small Team, Fast Results
With an intentionally small team, Hatchet uses Fly.io to help avoid growing a large DevOps overhead. Fly's infrastructure meant they could quickly deliver major features – in some cases building in months what could have taken years elsewhere. "Fly.io's been rock solid stable for us, with fantastic support – super fast and responsive, even when we've had to untangle some pretty hairy billing issues", Alexander concludes.
Thanks to Fly.io, Hatchet can stay lean, move fast, and focus on what matters most: making sure your background tasks quietly succeed, with no days ruined.