Engineering
Behind every dependable automation is a lot of careful engineering. In this post, we take you under the hood of Shard to share the principles and trade-offs behind how our platform runs your workflows.
An event-driven core
Everything in Shard starts as an event: a pull request merging, a message arriving, a webhook landing. Events flow into a queue, and a pool of workers picks them up and runs the matching automations. That keeps triggers decoupled from execution, so each part can scale on its own.
Safe by default
Automations touch real systems, so safety is built in. Events carry unique keys to prevent duplicate runs, failed steps retry with increasing delays, and every outgoing webhook is signed so the receiver can verify where it came from.
Observable runs
Every run is recorded step by step, with its inputs, outputs, and timing. That detail powers run history and monitoring for our customers, and it's also what lets AI Assist explain a failure in plain language instead of guessing.
Ahmed Samir
Engineering Lead
Builds the infrastructure for what's next.
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