Apache Airflow® with Astro by Astronomer - Pay As You Go

What do you like best about the product?

It's easy to schedule tasks using different configurations.

What do you dislike about the product?

There is no filtering by logical date or user. This makes it challenging to determine both when and who ran the DAG. The issue becomes even more noticeable when adjusting the display from 50 to 100 runs.

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

Scheduling complex workflows

What do you like best about the product?

Astro reduces the necessity for a dedicated DevOps team member.

What do you dislike about the product?

Some of the tasks provided by Astro have more limited capabilities compared to Airflow, and in certain areas, such as alerts, they are not as effective.

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

We use Airflow as our orchestrator, which allows us to monitor the progress of our pipelines.

What do you like best about the product?

What I like best about Astro by Astronomer is how it simplifies and standardizes Airflow deployments, giving teams reliable pipelines, observability, and CI/CD integration out of the box — it turns Airflow into a truly production-ready data platform.

What do you dislike about the product?

What I dislike about Astro by Astronomer is that it can feel too opinionated and dependent on Astronomer’s ecosystem, which limits flexibility for custom Airflow setups — plus, pricing and vendor lock-in can be concerns for smaller teams or self-hosted environments.

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

Astro by Astronomer solves deployment and monitoring issues in Airflow, making pipelines more stable, scalable, and easy to manage, which lets me focus on building data workflows instead of maintaining infrastructure.

What do you like best about the product?

I started using Astro at my company back in 2021, focusing on Astro Hybrid deployments. Setting up a reliable Airflow cluster with proper networking and load balancing can be a complex task. Astronomer's Astro Hybrid product, however, significantly reduces the DevOps workload involved in maintaining the cluster, while still allowing you and your organization to keep control over your infrastructure and data. This lets you spend more time on what really matters: developing Airflow DAG code.

Additionally, it's straightforward to spin up or tear down Airflow clusters as needed for development purposes, which is especially helpful for comprehensive end-to-end or staging tests.

What do you dislike about the product?

While the support team is generally helpful, I've noticed that response times for support tickets have become increasingly slow, likely due to a growing customer base. Support is especially limited during East Asia timezones, where it can feel almost non-existent.

Additionally, when dealing with more complex issues, the responses to support tickets can sometimes be vague, even when I've provided all the necessary context in my initial request. I recognize that it's challenging to address complicated problems thoroughly, particularly when communication involves both support engineers and developers. For these more involved cases, if your company has access to a dedicated Slack channel shared with Astronomer developers, I recommend using it. This direct line of communication can make it much easier to resolve issues efficiently.

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

Astro streamlines the often tedious process of setting up infrastructure with Airflow, allowing you to concentrate on what truly matters for your business: writing DAG code and deploying changes to production more efficiently.

What do you like best about the product?

I use it on a daily basis to manage Airflow environments efficiently. It simplifies Airflow orchestration with an intuitive interface and easy deployment. It’s well-documented, stable, and saves time when managing environments.

What do you dislike about the product?

Some advanced configurations require manual steps or deeper platform knowledge. The pricing can be high for small teams.

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

Astro addresses the complexity of managing Airflow environments by providing a scalable platform. This reduces operational overhead and the risks associated with workflow failures, enabling a focus on process optimization rather than infrastructure management.