Financial Times is increasing its digital revenue by allowing business people to make data-driven decisions. Providing an Airflow based platform where data engineers, data scientists, BI experts and others can run language agnostic jobs was a huge swing. One of the most successful steps in the platform’s development was building our own execution environment, allowing stakeholders to self deploy jobs without cross team dependencies on top of the unlimited scale of Kubernetes. In this talk we share how we have integrated and extended Airflow at Financial Times. The main topics we will cover include: Providing team level security isolation Removing cross team dependencies Creating execution environment for independently creating and deploying R, Python, JAVA, Spark, etc jobs Reducing latency when sharing data between task instances Integrating all these features on top of Kubernetes

Astronomer is focused on improving Airflow’s user experience through the entire lifecycle — from authoring + testing DAGs, to building containers and deploying the DAGs, to running and monitoring both the DAGs and the infrastructure that they are operating within — with an eye towards increased security and governance as well. In this talk we walk you through some current UX challenges, an overview of how the Astronomer platform addresses the major challenges, and also provide sneak peek of the things that we’re working on in the coming months to improve Airflow’s user experience. This is a sponsored talk, presented by Astronomer .

This talk discusses how to build an Airflow based data platform that can take advantage of popular ML tools (Jupyter, Tensorflow, Spark) while creating an easy-to-manage/monitor As the field of data science grows in popularity, companies find themselves in need of a single common language that can connect their data science teams and data infrastructure teams. Data scientists want rapid iteration, infrastructure engineers want monitoring and security controls, and product owners want their solutions deployed in time for quarterly reports. This talk will discuss how to build an Airflow based data platform that can take advantage of popular ML tools (Jupyter, Tensorflow, Spark) while creating an easy-to-manage/monitor ecosystem for data infrastructure and support team. In this talk, we will take an idea from a single-machine Jupyter Notebook to a cross-service Spark + Tensorflow pipeline, to a canary tested, production-ready model served on Google Cloud Functions. We will show how Apache Airflow can connect all layers of a data team to deliver rapid results.

In the contemporary world security is important more than ever - Airflow installations are no exception. Google Cloud Platform and Cloud Composer offer useful security options for running your DAGs and tasks in a way so you effectively can manage a risk of data exfiltration and access to the system is limited. This is a sponsored talk, presented by Google Cloud .

In this talk, we share the lessons learned while building a scheduler-as-a-service leveraging Apache Airflow to achieve improved stability and security for one of the largest gaming companies. The platform integrates with different data sources and meets varied SLA’s across workflows owned by multiple game studios. In particular, we present a comprehensive self-serve airflow architecture with multi-tenancy, auto-dag generation, SSO-integration with improved ease of deployment. Within Electronic Arts, to provide scheduler-as-a-service and to support hundreds of thousands of execution workflows, each team requires an isolated environment with access to a central data lake containing several petabytes of anonymized player and game metrics. Leveraging Airflow, each team is provided a private code repository and namespace with which they can deploy their DAGs at their own behest. To support agile development cycles, a private testing sandbox and auto-deployment to an isolated multi-tenant airflow platform has been made available to game studios. In production, a single dockerized airflow deployment on Kubernetes is utilized to ensure highly availability and single-step deployment. Custom SSO-integration and RBAC-based operator and sensor whitelisting allows for secure logical isolation. In addition, providing dynamic DAG instantiation capability helps address varied SLA’s during game launch seasons that are staggered through a financial year.

In this talk we review how Airflow helped create a tool to detect data anomalies. Leveraging Airflow for process management, database interoperability, and authentication created an easy path forward to achieve scale, decrease the development time and pass security audits. While Airflow is generally looked at as a solution to manage data pipelines, integrating tools with Airflow can also speed up development of those tools. The Data Anomaly Detector was created at One Medical to scan thousands of metrics per day for data anomalies. It’s a complicated tool and much of that complexity was outsourced to Airflow. Because the data infrastructure at One Medical was already built around Airflow, and Airflow had many desirable features, it made sense to build the tool to integrate closely with Airflow. The end result was more time could be spend on building features to do statistical analysis, and less effort had to be spent on database authentication, interoperability or process management. It’s an interesting example of how Airflow can be leveraged to build data intensive tools.