Get in control of your workflows with Airflow

Whenever you work with data, sooner or later you stumble across the definition of your workflows. At what point should you process your customer’s data? What subsequent steps are necessary? And what went wrong with your data processing last Saturday night?

At Blue Yonder we use Airflow (https://github.com/airbnb/airflow), an open source Python package from Airbnb to solve these problems. It can be extended with new functionality by developing plugins in Python, without the need to fork the repo. With Airflow, we define workflows as directed acyclic graphs and get a shiny UI for free. Airflow comes with some task operators which can be used out of the box to complete certain tasks. For more specific cases, tasks can be developed by the end user. Best of all: even the configuration is done completely in Python!

This talk will explain the concepts behind Airflow, demonstrating how to define your own workflows in Python code and how to extend the functionality with new task operators and UI blueprints. You’ll also get to hear about our experiences using this tool in real-world scenarios.