One year ago, we open-sourced the Prefect engine, and the response has been incredible. Our lightweight Python framework for combining tasks into workflows has been embraced by users otherwise forced to contend with cumbersome and disappointing tools. Today, we’re taking another huge step forward and open-sourcing an orchestration layer for Prefect — including the Prefect Cloud UI.

You can get the code and fire it up right now: just prefect server start .

Prefect’s UI is now open-source 🎉

The response to Prefect has exceeded all of our expectations. The vibrancy of our community is wonderful, and the breadth of use cases we’ve seen has been incredible. We’ve gotten to work with everyone from climate scientists to astronauts; online educators to World Series champions; single-person data teams to the largest banks in the world. One of the benefits of working directly with such great partners is that we’ve had the opportunity to hone our product with a gauntlet of real-world use cases. Despite the variety of applications, we see the very same negative engineering frustrations repeated across every environment, rediscovering our original thesis over and over:

Negative engineering problems are not always complex, or sophisticated, or difficult. On the contrary: they are often minor, annoying, and repetitive.

This has translated into Prefect’s insurance-like design goal to be minimally invasive when things run smoothly and maximally helpful when things go wrong.

COVID-19 is certainly an extreme example of things going wrong. At Prefect, we’ve tried to figure out how we, as a company, can help. The clear solution is to take features that were formerly part of our proprietary platform and release them as open-source. Our major motivation is to ensure that individuals and businesses can start taking advantage of our software with the least friction possible. As an open-source community, this furthers our objective of delivering a best-in-class workflow management experience without compromise; as a business, allying ourselves with our users at the earliest possible moment — for free — is the ultimate expression of our commercial directive: deliver value, don’t extract it.

Prefect was not started to be a business; Prefect was started to solve a problem. The successful company that followed is merely evidence of the size and scope of that problem, as well as the value and efficacy of our solution. By open-sourcing more of the Prefect Cloud stack, we hope to deliver a valuable workflow management system to our users at a moment when saving time and money is especially important.

Getting Started