Ask HN: How do services like make.com, pipedream,zapier integrations work?

Time and effort. Integrations require a team to build, as well as provide care and feeding as API structures change beneath your system, sometimes with zero notice. It helps if you can partner with companies who will own and maintain their own integration, but you will need to demonstrate a value proposition to them that it is worth their resources.

If an integration breaks, in my experience, your application telemetry alerts to this. Parts of the system are paused. A fix is implemented, shipped to your fleet (compute responsible for processing web hooks, polling API endpoints, or both), and the system is gracefully unpaused (your queue for scheduled polling tasks begins to fill again, or you allow webhooks ingested to flow through to processing stages vs being held in a queue).

In theory, you’re “just” serializing and deserializing JSON. In practice, it’s a constant grind keeping the machine running.

Perhaps https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40469773 might assist in your efforts. Good luck!

When I've used these products, they seemed to modularize and normalize each part of the pipeline separately. It's never like one "Gmail to JSON integration" and another "Gmail to Airtable integration", but instead just small modules that can be hooked together.

The input chunk (say Gmail) is one module, then the JSON processing chunk is another, then the output (like an API webhook) is another. Individual services can and do break, but the other parts still work.

If you have a workflow like "Read incoming emails, extract HTML data to JSON, extract object from JSON, transform shape of JSON, send to API", that's probably (at least) 4 different modules. If the incoming email part breaks, they can fix that separately. Likewise, you can pretty quickly hook up another output module, like if you wanted a direct connection to the Airtable API instead of a generic webhook.

I also don't know that the process of adding integrations is "quick". Zapier has been around forever and in the beginning they barely supported any third-party integrations. Make.com was previously Integromat and they also had few integrations at first – I remember requesting a bunch a few years back, when I was looking for a tool in this space.

But then serverless workers really took off and it became easy to write your own functions-as-a-service instead of waiting for the no-code tools to update.

From my experience working with IBM products at an enterprise level, a lot of the integrations only provide basic functionality or they are used to demonstrate a happy path for the sales team. Once you go into the implementation phase, you run into multiple issues and require substantial development to actually make it work within a client's environment.

By developing many small modules that are meant to run within the generalised machinery. Something like this: https://github.com/n8n-io/n8n/tree/master/packages/nodes-bas...