Apache Airflow Best Practices. A practical guide to orchestrating data workflow with Apache Airflow

Dylan Intorf, Dylan Storey, Kendrick van Doorn

Data professionals face the challenge of managing complex data pipelines, orchestrating workflows across diverse systems, and ensuring scalable, reliable data processing. This definitive guide to mastering Apache Airflow, written by experts in engineering, data strategy, and problem-solving across tech, financial, and life sciences industries, is your key to overcoming these challenges. Covering everything from Airflow fundamentals to advanced topics such as custom plugin development, multi-tenancy, and cloud deployment, this book provides a structured approach to workflow orchestration. You’ll start with an introduction to data orchestration and Apache Airflow 2.x updates, followed by DAG authoring, managing Airflow components, and connecting to external data sources. Through real-world use cases, you’ll learn how to implement ETL pipelines and orchestrate ML workflows in your environment, and scale Airflow for high availability and performance. You’ll also learn how to deploy Airflow in cloud environments, tackle operational considerations for scaling, and apply best practices for CI/CD and monitoring.By the end of this book, you’ll be proficient in operating and using Apache Airflow, authoring high-quality workflows in Python, and making informed decisions crucial for production-ready Airflow implementations.