Apache Airflow

Introduction to Airflow

What is Airflow?

Airflow is a free, open-source tool designed to help you automate and manage workflows. It allows you to schedule and monitor tasks that need to run in a specific order, making it easier to manage complex processes.

You can follow this documentation, there are videos published on the same topics with steps. Link to the playlist is here.

Warning

Please note this is not Official documentation and prepared as I am exploring these tools. If you see any issue or any missing content please feel free to correct and create a pull request or you can reach to me on [email protected]. Thank you!

Why Use Airflow?

Airflow is great for managing workflows that have multiple steps or dependencies. It’s used by companies of all sizes to automate things like data pipelines, machine learning tasks, or even scheduling reminders.

How Does Airflow Work?

At its core, Airflow is all about creating Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) – a fancy way of saying that it organizes tasks in a flow, ensuring that each task happens in the right order.

Tasks: These are the individual jobs or steps that need to be completed.
DAGs: These define the relationships between tasks and when they should run.

Airflow lets you schedule these tasks, monitor their progress, and troubleshoot any issues that arise.

Key Features

Ease of Use: It’s designed to be simple for both beginners and experts.
Scalability: Airflow can scale to handle large and complex workflows.
Extensibility: You can add custom tasks or integrate with various services like Google Cloud, AWS, or databases.

Common Use Cases

Data Pipelines: Automating data processing and transfers.
Machine Learning: Running model training and evaluation tasks.
System Monitoring: Automating server checks and updates.

What You Need to Get Started

To use Airflow, you’ll need:

A Python environment (Airflow is Python-based).
A way to store your workflow definitions (usually a database).
The Airflow web interface to monitor your tasks.

With Airflow, managing and automating workflows becomes much easier, no matter how complex they are!

Airflow Documentation Index