Prefect Cloud has Launched! 🎉
For more than two years, Prefect has been making steady progress on our mission to eliminate negative engineering. Today, we’re excited to announce that Prefect Cloud is available to the public — including its free Scheduler tier!
We worked with hundreds of early Cloud previewers and tens of Lighthouse Partners to reach this point. Since July 2019, when we onboarded Cloud’s very first customer, we have made enormous strides in our understanding of workflow systems and user requirements.
The biggest lesson of all is that a system we built for a very specific set of customers — large financial institutions — has come to dominate our business model. Our Hybrid Model delivers cloud convenience with on-prem security, and is so innovative it has resulted in two separate patent filings. Users keep their code and data on their private infrastructure — whether that’s a personal laptop, an IoT device, a cloud-hosted cluster, a serverless function, or just bare metal — while Prefect Cloud’s managed orchestration service provides complete oversight and confidence. The hybrid model is a clear advantage that Prefect provides over any alternative system.
Learn more about the hybrid model here.
The public release of Prefect Cloud caps “Phase 1” of our company’s story. It represents everything we’ve learned about negative engineering, and is informed by thousands of user stories gathered from all industries and experience levels. Just as when we launched our open-source Prefect Core library with the extreme confidence that comes from iterating with a small group of early previewers, we’ve already seen Prefect Cloud deployed at institutions large and small. We know that it fulfills the objective we laid out in this blog a year and a half ago:
Prefect is the codification of the patterns we observe in modern data engineering.
At our core, we provide two things. One is our open-source framework [Core], which operates like a hardware store: stocked with all the necessary components for building great data applications. The other is our platform logic [Cloud], which we think of as the store manager: guiding users to the right tools and making sure their projects are successful. With these two things working together, we can offer a compelling solution for both positive and negative engineering problems.
What will you build?
— The Prefect Team
