Airflow Summit 2020 talk

Inline with the Corona pandemic, I gave my first online conference talk! The Airflow Summit 2020 was wonderfully organized and I must say I liked the ability to participate in a conference without leaving home. Giving a talk to a computer is a very different experience then giving it live, a lot less interaction with the audience but on the plus side, it’s much less stressful as well.

At Bluevine we use Airflow to drive our ML platform. In the talk, I presented the challenges and gains we had at transitioning from a single server running Python scripts with cron to a full blown Airflow setup. Some of the points that I’ve covered are:

• Supporting multiple Python versions
• Event driven DAGs
• Airflow Performance issues and how we circumvented them
• Building Airflow plugins to enhance observability
• Monitoring Airflow using Grafana
• Patching Airflow scheduler

Here are the slides: