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At my previous employer, we were running self-hosted Airflow in AWS, which really was a nightmare. The engineer that set it up didn't account for any kind of sc
by doom2 4y ago
At my previous employer, we were running self-hosted Airflow in AWS, which really was a nightmare. The engineer that set it up didn't account for any kind of scaling and all the code was a mess. We would also get issues like logs not syncing correctly in our environment or transient networking issues that somehow didn't fail the given Airflow task. Eventually, we did a dual migration: temporarily switching to AWS managed Airflow (their Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow product) while also rewriting the DAGs in Dagster.
Dagster was a great solution for us. Their notion of software defined assets allowed us to track metadata of the Redshift and Snowflake tables we were working with. Working with re-runs and partitioned data was a breeze. It did take a while to onboard the whole team and get things working smoothly, which was a bit difficult because Dagster is still young and they were often making changes to how parts of the system worked (although nothing that was immediately backwards incompatible).
We also enjoyed some of the out of the box features like resources and unit testing jobs. Overall, I think it made our team focus more on our data and what we wanted to do with it rather than feeling like we had to wrangle with Airflow just to get things running.
- kbd 4y agoThanks for your comment! Ditto last time I ran Airflow locally it took like 5 Docker containers. Then I forgot about the project and for a while was furious at Docker for randomly taking 100% CPU. Then I realized it was because of the Airflow containers that would restart along with Docker. I didn't get much further with Airflow. Dagster, on the other hand, seems to let you scale from using it locally as a library all the way to running on ECS/K8s etc. Along with that there's unfortunately a ton of complexity in setting it up but that's not Dagster's fault and it seems like Dagster works once you get it set up. Agree about it being young and there being some rough spots but it's got lots of good ideas. We were nearly done setting it up but got pulled off onto more urgent things, so I haven't run it in production yet. I'm glad to hear it worked well for you!
- jdaddy 4y agoout of curiosity, why was it hard to onboard the team to Dagster?