Apache Airflow is the most widely adopted workflow orchestration platform. Created at Airbnb in 2014, it lets you programmatically author, schedule, and monitor workflows as Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) in Python. It's battle-tested at thousands of companies including Google, Twitter, and Spotify.
✓Active Community: Largest orchestration community
Pros
👍Industry standard with massive adoption
👍Huge ecosystem of operators and plugins
👍Extensive documentation and resources
👍Multiple managed offerings available
👍Strong job market for Airflow skills
👍Battle-tested at scale
Cons
👎Task-centric (not asset-centric)
👎Development experience is clunky
👎Testing DAGs locally is painful
👎Scheduler can be slow at scale
👎Dependency management is tricky
Best For
Teams with existing Airflow deployments or those who need the ecosystem and managed options. Still the safe choice for enterprise, though modern alternatives are gaining ground.
