I once worked with a software stack called ActiveBatch. I really wish there was something as easy to set up as ActiveBatch available for the consumer market. Even something like Apache Airflow isn't competitive in terms of ease of setup.

Activebatch is literally just install the scheduler on a Windows system, connect a SQL Server DB(use community edition) and then install the "execution agent" on whatever machine you want to run jobs on. In 10-15 mins you have a full automation environment.

From there, you have access to a decent GUI where you can drag, drop connect jobs together and mix and match different technologies, APIs, whatever because you can actually pass data and context from one step to another. They have a library of hundreds of "Job Steps" that range from simple stuff like copying files/FTP/SSH to things like calculating checksums to things like interacting with Twitter to send out tweets based on whatever condition you specify. There is just so much you can do and then they allow you to extend it with scripting/APIs etc.

Has anyone here used Activebatch? It is a hidden gem. Unfortunately it is an enterprise product so it is off limits to most people. Really wish someone made an open source alternative. :/

Here is a video but it does a pretty poor job explaining the capabilities of this software: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6Pw-Sisry0