Big data has undeniably changed the future of modern business. Many businesses are using big data technology to improve their marketing, make more informed hiring decisions, minimize production waste and solve other challenges. Companies are projected to spend over $234 billion by 2026.
A number of new data tools have helped companies make the most of their big data strategies. One of the most helpful has been Airflow.
Airflow is a Great Tool for Data-Driven Businesses
The digital age and the rise in technology have allowed many advancements in everything from business to medicine to luxury and entertainment. People are more connected and empowered now than ever before. The whole globe can communicate and understand in ways never before possible. This, however, is a lot of data created as a product of these advancements.
Companies that want to make the most of big data have to know how to leverage it effectively. This is a lot easier to do when you have the right tools at your fingertips.
For companies operating in the digital world, very few things are more important than data. Data is the lifeblood of a company, helping it understand where it has been, how it’s doing, and how best to move forward. But unfortunately, the importance of data has also raised some significant problems.
How do companies store and access their data? They have to start by having the right foundation for their data analytics strategy. What tools do they need to keep their data and access it across the company? Workflow management software or WMS is one tool that helps companies orchestrate their data and execute data-driven projects. Airflow is one of the oldest and most trusted WMS. It is a potent tool to help companies orchestrate their data and give them management software to structure their workflow.
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If you are just starting in this world and have been curious about Airflow and Airflow alternatives, everything you need to know!
What Exactly is Airflow?
Airflow is a program that helps companies make data-driven decisions by helping to orchestrate their data and providing a task assignment tool to help them build and manage pipelines. This kind of tool is designed to help data flow in an ordered fashion to its desired destinations and give companies the ability to schedule and execute projects.
Developed originally by Airbnb, Airflow has been one of the most trusted workflow management software. However, some problems can arise quickly when a company starts collecting data. The first one is that data can be stored in varying formats that make data retrieval and analysis complicated. Take something as simple as a date, for example. Within one company, two different data sources could store dates in independent manners. One might simply use a series of numbers, while another might spell out the date.
This may not seem like a high priority problem until the company needs to start aggregating its data into a data stack and analyzing it. The discrepancies in how these two dates were held in a database could make retrieving the data for accurate analysis problematic.
Orchestration tools take all the data found throughout a company and help unify it into a single format. This makes data retrieval and analysis not only faster but more accurate. Workflow management software like Airflow acts as an orchestrator and brings another essential tool – automation.
Because it’s a workflow management software, it gives data engineers the tools they need to schedule and automate complicated tasks that could otherwise be very tedious and time-consuming.
Data itself is vitally important to a company. Airflow is designed to help that company understand its data from various sources and then manage pipelines that take that data where it needs to go. As important as data is, if a company can’t push that data to a part of the company where it can be used to make data-driven decisions, it’s not very valuable.
Alternatives to Airflow
Nothing about creating an orchestration tool like Airflow is easy. This complicated tool has a user-friendly interface and good support; however, some scenarios benefit from other competing tools. For instance, when it comes to local development, testing, and storage abstract, another tool like Dagster or Prefect could be better suited for the task.
This field of WMS is still relatively new, and Airflow is one of the most established. That being said, the rise of competing tools like Dagster and Prefect help to only better the landscape of WMS tools because they challenge and offer solutions where Airflow struggles to perform.
Airflow is a Crucial Technology that Data-Driven Businesses Can’t Ignore
You need to make the most of big data if you hope to help your company succeed in 2022. A number of great data tools will help you accomplish this. One of the best tools is Airflow.
How to take your company’s data and turn it into powerful analytics that help drive you toward to future. This is a growing field. If you want something tried and true, Airflow is an attractive option that has served several successful companies.