Apache Airflow with Astro by Astronomer - Annual Plans

What do you like best about the product?

I like that it is flexible, well documented, has good support. Its UI is pleasing too. It's fast, allows to schedule lots differents jobs by nature (data engineering, ML models, MLOps, etc). It's overall a fantastic orchestration service.

What do you dislike about the product?

I wish it was easier to see duration of each task over the recent runs.

I also wish we didn't have to have all our ETLs in one github repository as it makes going from dev to prod messy at times.

I would love to see even more training for new people. As an experienced user it clearly has a high learning curve and find myself having to explain stuff a lot to people!


Quite a lot of breaking changes with google dependencies especially - can be quite time consuming to just maintain the instances running despite no changes to code.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Primarily it is a simple interface to orchestrate jobs on GCP - that's it. It allows me to run big data jobs fluidly, and allows me to easily see when a job hasn't run.

What do you like best about the product?

With Astronomer we don't need to worry about the infrastructure, everything is abstracted to us, we just need to click a few times to implement a new deployment (very easy) access the Astronomer UI, and start doing things. This improved our team's speed to develop new solutions a lot! Astronomer became our daily tool for workflow management. Avoiding wasting time with deployments and machines and focusing on what is truly important, the business. Having the most recent version of airflow available one day after the release is a plus, we can count on the bug fixes and new features as fast as possible (faster than if we had our airflow solution or any other SaaS). The airflow support team has helped us to unblock many problems, most of them about how Airflow works and the best use of the tool, also we were able to deploy easily every single integration that we use with our current cloud provider.

What do you dislike about the product?

Astronomer still lacks some "premium features", something that is not available at opensource version of Airflow. I know that we have some extra tools like lineage (this one needs a lot more of attention from astronomers team to be something easy and valid to use) and the "cloud ide" which is a great idea however needs more completeness, for example it lacks the ability to simply install private libraries or connect with macro functions (like jinja) from our SQL definition.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Astronomer is our main workflow tool. We use it for all the data pipelines that we create. Orchestrating every data transformation using SQL + Jinja and with Redshift as a data warehouse, we are able to run 100% of our data platform workflows inside Astronomer. The new pricing model based not on task execution but in resources usage was a game change for us! Now we can create dags as they should, using all the best practices.

What do you like best about the product?

I like the fact that they have come a long way from being a startup supporting opensource airflow to becoming an enterprise focusing on what their customers want. They have a history of feature rich development to provide best cutomer support. Their dev and production enviornment deployment via CI/CD provide an ease of implementation and integration of Airflow for their customers. I find the system easy to use that gives me confidence. They had their ups and downs as an orgination but they have come a long way from there. I am happy to say Fanduel 's decion to use Astronomer has proven to be a good success.

What do you dislike about the product?

There are no major problems in using Astro but some quirks here and there. Overall I like the way they are building the product and support Airflow.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

They are providing a stable platform on Kubernetes to run our big workload orchestration of around thousand data piplines and they are doing a very good job.

What do you like best about the product?

Of the three best known managed Airflow options (MWAA, Cloud Composer, Astronomer), I think Astronomer is the most streamlined and easy-to-use. The Docker image/runtime is well thought out, and the hybrid managed Dataplane option has sensible ways of doing things and removes the burden of maintaining the deployment. I love the Astro CLI and how easy it is to customize the base Airflow image they provide. The docs are good and they are closest to the actual core Airflow community.

What do you dislike about the product?

Pricier than the other two, but IMO the extra features are well worth it. Charging by task run also requires care. Outside of pricing/cost though... it's great. I gave them a 9 instead of a 10 because of the cost.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Workflow orchestration/data pipelines.

What do you like best about the product?

The customer support and reliability, also easy to implement.

What do you dislike about the product?

They can maybe do the alerts more configurable in terms of the data to show in the alert.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Astro solves all the infrastructure support and maintenance, also any updates/patches are 100% managed by astro and they do it really well.