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

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.

What do you like best about the product?

I appreciate the UI improvements and the ability to access run statistics. Although I haven't had the opportunity to develop directly on Astro, the integration between GitHub and Astro provides me with all the information I need to carry out my responsibilities as a product support engineer.

What do you dislike about the product?

The start time vs run time can be a little misleading. I don't have many complaints about Astro, it functions well, and does what it needs to do.

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

Automating client file ingestion, building our reporting DB and creating reports for our clients.

What do you like best about the product?

I appreciate the observability the platform provides for all of our company's deployments. Additionally, the integration with platforms such as GitHub and Bitbucket to sync the DAGs is very useful. Deploying with the API is straightforward and user-friendly, but at the moment, I personally prefer syncing DAGs rather than including them in the image.

My team always push new dags and the tool's uptime is quite good, as I have never seen any problems.

What do you dislike about the product?

With the new version of airflow, I have some problems with the pods that run all the process. But nothing with astronomer.

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

A significant portion of our data processes relies on Airflow, which allows us to monitor everything through the Astronomer UI and respond quickly if any process fails. Previously, I managed a self-deployed Airflow instance on Kubernetes, but the observability features provided by Astro have noticeably improved my workflow at work.