The highly anticipated Apache Airflow Summit in Toronto 2023 exceeded all expectations. This Summit marked a significant milestone as the first global in-person gathering of Apache Airflow enthusiasts since its inception by Airbnb in 2014.
Spanning three full days, the event featured a robust lineup of approximately a hundred sessions making it a knowledge-packed networking experience.
Marc Lamberti highlighted the first day by presenting “What Everybody Ought to Know About Airflow” followed by “Demystifying Apache Airflow: Separating Facts from Fiction” by Uma Ramadoss and Shubham Mehta from Amazon Web Services (AWS). They factually debunked 6 main misconceptions Airflow Users have one of which was the misconception that it is problematic to scale Airflow in production.
On the second day, Kaxil Naik and Julian LaNeve from Astronomer presented the first keynote on “Building and deploying LLM applications with Apache Airflow” and showed the standard of the primary resource for Astronomer and Airflow queries. Clayton Coleman, representing Google, delivered an engaging presentation titled “AI/ML’s Impact on Orchestration: Leveraging Kubernetes to Enhance Airflow.” In this talk he explained the role of Kubernetes in various ecosystems such as Apache Airflow.
The panel discussion titled “The Future of Airflow: What Users Want,” featuring Jarek Potiuk, Viraj Parekh, Rafal Biegacz, and John Jackson, provided valuable insights. They discussed the key features that offer the most significant benefits to Airflow users. Jonathan Talmi presented “Manifest destiny: Orchestrating dbt using Airflow”, in this talk, he explained several ways of orchestrating dbt and showed the disadvantages of using one method over the other.
The Summit’s final day offered attendees the opportunity to participate in various workshops, each led by Apache Airflow experts. The sponsor booths by Google, AWS, IBM, Preset, Qbiz, BMC, Astronomer, and Snowflake delved into discussions about how these technologies can streamline Airflow management. The success of this Summit has undoubtedly set a remarkable standard, leaving Airflow Enthusiasts eagerly anticipating the next edition.
Abdullahi Ayantayo
