Astronomer, the company behind Astro, the leading fully-managed service for Apache Airflow, is unveiling its latest platform release, forwarding pipeline resilience, release velocity, and hardened security, as well as support for dbt on Astro—the platform’s first foray outside of the Airflow universe.
Astronomer’s release emphasizes its commitment to meeting the needs of enterprises across a broad spectrum of use cases. For Airflow—the industry’s de-facto standard for expressing pipelines and orchestrating data flows as code, according to the company—Astronomer delivers enterprise-grade capabilities that enable teams to:
- Shift their focus to data rather than pipelines
- Consolidate their complex data stacks
- Upgrade and rollback iterations of Airflow with confidence, and more
Now, the latest version of Astro offers universal metrics support for metric exports to popular monitoring tools for increased visibility of system health, as well as self-healing workers that autonomously detect and halt idle processes that can result in further, larger failures, stale data risks, and system downtime.
This release introduces Astro Terraform Provider, a capability that streamlines Airflow infrastructure management with automations for consistent, reproducible, scalable deployments. Additionally, customer managed workload identity on AWS drives enhanced governance via reliable and secure access to data services to help reduce security vulnerabilities.
Notably, this update reflects Astronomer’s commitment toward extending its features to other open source software with its newfound support for dbt, an open source command line tool for transforming data while adhering to software engineering best practices. dbt on Astro empowers users to ease data workflow management by centralizing dbt and Airflow within a single interface.
Ultimately, Astronomer’s support for dbt helps reduce complexity, tool fragmentation, and context switching, powering a simplified user experience that centers on data analysis and rapid decision making, according to the company.
“For years, Astro has given our customers the best way to run Airflow, and many have told us they want us to bring unified orchestration and observability to other technologies that are critical to their data stack,” said Andy Byron, chief executive officer of Astronomer. “If it adds value and lowers the cost of ownership for our customers, Astronomer will continue to build out a unified platform to support whatever enterprises are building, from analytics to AI.”
“Our open-source integration became incredibly popular very quickly, but it doesn’t solve all the challenges of running dbt and Airflow together,” said Julian LaNeve, chief technology officer of Astronomer. “In a time where organizations are being asked to do the same or more with the same budgets, we’ve had customers come to us with concerns about the price of other approaches at the enterprise scale, and we’re seeing them move their dbt transformations onto Astro where it’s 10x cheaper while still solving the operational challenges.”
To learn more about Astronomer, please visit https://www.astronomer.io/.