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Comment by YawningAngel | Hacker News Reader

Off-the-shelf open source stuff is often the product of big companies open sourcing internal tools though. Airflow, which you name check, is a great example of this. Temporal is another example in the space. Someone has to be dumb enough to build new stuff

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airflow and Temporal has teams dedicated to maintain and extend their system. And these systems are business critical for astronomer/temporal, respectively.

And they develop them in a way that works for many customers and use cases, not just netflix.

But for netflix this is just another auxillary system, out of many others. Just a nice GUI to schedule cron jobs basically, does it make sense to sink resources into custom cron?

But when Airbnb created airflow, you could have said the same. It’s just later in its lifecycle.

Agreed.

To be fair, I doubt Maestro will take off like Airflow did.

Airflow filled a void of an easier orchestrator for Big Data with a prettier UI than the competitors of the time (Oozie, Luigi), implementing some UX patterns which had been tested at scale at Facebook with data swarm.

The field is quite a bit more crowded now.

Seems like you have some experience with the orchestrator offerings. Airflow still the way to go, or would you recommend something else for someone just starting down the path of selecting and implementing a data orchestrator?

I haven't used Airflow for years but it used to be quite clunky, not sure how much it's improved since. I'd look into Prefect and/or Dagster first, both are more modern alternatives built with Airflow's shortcomings in mind.

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