front matter
We’ve both been fortunate to be data engineers in interesting and challenging times. For better or worse, many companies and organizations are realizing that data plays a key role in managing and improving their operations. Recent developments in machine learning and AI have opened a slew of new opportunities to capitalize on. However, adopting data-centric processes is often difficult, as it generally requires coordinating jobs across many different heterogeneous systems and tying everything together in a nice, timely fashion for the next analysis or product deployment.
In 2014, engineers at Airbnb recognized the challenges of managing complex data workflows within the company. To address those challenges, they started developing Airflow: an open source solution that allowed them to write and schedule workflows and monitor workflow runs using the built-in web interface.