Glossary · letter A
Airflow
Apache AirflowWorkflow orchestrator for data engineering
Definition
An open-source platform for orchestrating data workflows. Airflow lets you define pipelines as Python code, then automatically run them on schedules with status monitoring, retry logic and a dashboard showing which step failed.
Business application
A company that nightly pulls sales data from three systems, transforms it and loads it into a data warehouse can have all of this as a single Airflow DAG. If any step fails, the team gets an email and can act — rather than waiting for someone in the business to notice missing data.