HACKER Q&A
📣 lgrebe

How to Run API Mashups


Hi HN,

i'm searching for infrastructure where i can run some API mash-ups without too much dev-ops hassle.

As a freelancer i log my time spent on projects using Clockify[1]. I also use web based finance management software for billing clients. As both offer a RESTful JSON API, with a few lines of code it's easy to extract time spent on a project from the clockify API and create a draft invoice in the finance software.

I'd like to run this and similar "API-Mashups" automatically every month or on demand (e.g. upon a webhook request), but for all sort of reasons, not on my local machine.

Some solutions i've looked at: Zappier[2] could offer what i'm looking for, especially their logging of tasks run is interesting but they do not support all features of the API and some easy to program logic only comes with plans that would be too expensive for me.

AWS Lambda should be able to do what i'm looking for but setting it up appears to require quite a bit of knowledge i don't want to spend the time on acquiring.

Netlify Functions[3] would absolutely cover what i'm looking for (taking the admin and setup requirements out of AWS, setting up env. vars for API secrets) but piggy-backing the deploy process of a website for the above task seems wrong.

RunKit[4] offers a nice prototype playground to create such a mash-up, allows for setting up API Secrets and using their endpoint functionality could allow for the on-demand triggering. Yet running something like a "once-a-month" cronjob there also seems wrong.

I would appreciate any suggestions on running "simple" API ETL tasks.

[1] https://clockify.me [2] https://zapier.com/home [3] https://functions.netlify.com [4] https://runkit.com/home


  👤 abdelhai Accepted Answer ✓
This is exactly why we created deta.sh It's essentially powered by AWS Lambda but requires no setup at all. It also has a built-in DB, cron, etc.

Happy to give you access.