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Moving data from diverse sources to the right location for AI use is a challenging task. That’s where data orchestration technologies like Apache Airflow fit in.
Today, the Apache Airflow community is out with its biggest update in years, with the debut of the 3.0 release. The new release marks the first major version update in four years. Airflow has been active, though, steadily incrementing on the 2.x series, including the 2.9 and 2.10 updates in 2024, which both had a heavy focus on AI.
In recent years, data engineers have adopted Apache Airflow as their de facto standard tool. Apache Airflow has established itself as the leading open-source workflow orchestration platform with over 3,000 contributors and widespread adoption across Fortune 500 companies. There are also multiple commercial services based on the platform, including Astronomer Astro, Google Cloud Composer, Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow (MWAA) and Microsoft Azure Data Factory Managed Airflow, among others.
As organizations struggle to coordinate data workflows across disparate systems, clouds and increasingly AI workloads, organizations have growing needs. Apache Airflow 3.0 addresses critical enterprise needs with an architectural redesign that could improve how organizations build and deploy data applications.
“To me, Airflow 3 is a new beginning, it is a foundation for a much greater sets of capabilities,” Vikram Koka, Apache Airflow PMC (project management committee ) member and Chief Strategy Officer at Astronomer, told VentureBeat in an exclusive interview. “This is almost a complete refactor based on what enterprises told us they needed for the next level of mission-critical adoption.”
Enterprise data complexity has changed data orchestration needs
As businesses increasingly rely on data-driven decision-making, the complexity of data workflows has exploded. Organizations now manage intricate pipelines spanning multiple cloud environments, diverse data sources and increasingly sophisticated AI workloads.
Airflow 3.0 emerges as a solution specifically designed to meet these evolving enterprise needs. Unlike previous versions, this release breaks away from a monolithic package, introducing a distributed client model that provides flexibility and security. This new architecture allows enterprises to:
Execute tasks across multiple cloud environments.
Implement granular security controls.
Support diverse programming languages.
Enable true multi-cloud deployments.
Airflow 3.0’s expanded language suppo …