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  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. NoSQL Databases
  4. NOSQL Database As A Service
  5. Airflow vs Azure Cosmos DB

Airflow vs Azure Cosmos DB

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Azure Cosmos DB
Azure Cosmos DB
Stacks594
Followers1.1K
Votes130
Airflow
Airflow
Stacks1.7K
Followers2.8K
Votes128

Airflow vs Azure Cosmos DB: What are the differences?

Developers describe Airflow as "A platform to programmaticaly author, schedule and monitor data pipelines, by Airbnb". Use Airflow to author workflows as directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) of tasks. The Airflow scheduler executes your tasks on an array of workers while following the specified dependencies. Rich command lines utilities makes performing complex surgeries on DAGs a snap. The rich user interface makes it easy to visualize pipelines running in production, monitor progress and troubleshoot issues when needed. On the other hand, Azure Cosmos DB is detailed as "A fully-managed, globally distributed NoSQL database service". Azure DocumentDB is a fully managed NoSQL database service built for fast and predictable performance, high availability, elastic scaling, global distribution, and ease of development.

Airflow belongs to "Workflow Manager" category of the tech stack, while Azure Cosmos DB can be primarily classified under "NoSQL Database as a Service".

Some of the features offered by Airflow are:

  • Dynamic: Airflow pipelines are configuration as code (Python), allowing for dynamic pipeline generation. This allows for writting code that instantiate pipelines dynamically.
  • Extensible: Easily define your own operators, executors and extend the library so that it fits the level of abstraction that suits your environment.
  • Elegant: Airflow pipelines are lean and explicit. Parameterizing your scripts is built in the core of Airflow using powerful Jinja templating engine.

On the other hand, Azure Cosmos DB provides the following key features:

  • Fully managed with 99.99% Availability SLA
  • Elastically and highly scalable (both throughput and storage)
  • Predictable low latency: <10ms @ P99 reads and <15ms @ P99 fully-indexed writes

Airflow is an open source tool with 12.7K GitHub stars and 4.62K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Airflow's open source repository on GitHub.

According to the StackShare community, Airflow has a broader approval, being mentioned in 70 company stacks & 30 developers stacks; compared to Azure Cosmos DB, which is listed in 24 company stacks and 23 developer stacks.

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Advice on Azure Cosmos DB, Airflow

Anonymous
Anonymous

Jan 19, 2020

Needs advice

I am so confused. I need a tool that will allow me to go to about 10 different URLs to get a list of objects. Those object lists will be hundreds or thousands in length. I then need to get detailed data lists about each object. Those detailed data lists can have hundreds of elements that could be map/reduced somehow. My batch process dies sometimes halfway through which means hours of processing gone, i.e. time wasted. I need something like a directed graph that will keep results of successful data collection and allow me either pragmatically or manually to retry the failed ones some way (0 - forever) times. I want it to then process all the ones that have succeeded or been effectively ignored and load the data store with the aggregation of some couple thousand data-points. I know hitting this many endpoints is not a good practice but I can't put collectors on all the endpoints or anything like that. It is pretty much the only way to get the data.

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Comments

Detailed Comparison

Azure Cosmos DB
Azure Cosmos DB
Airflow
Airflow

Azure DocumentDB is a fully managed NoSQL database service built for fast and predictable performance, high availability, elastic scaling, global distribution, and ease of development.

Use Airflow to author workflows as directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) of tasks. The Airflow scheduler executes your tasks on an array of workers while following the specified dependencies. Rich command lines utilities makes performing complex surgeries on DAGs a snap. The rich user interface makes it easy to visualize pipelines running in production, monitor progress and troubleshoot issues when needed.

Fully managed with 99.99% Availability SLA;Elastically and highly scalable (both throughput and storage);Predictable low latency: <10ms @ P99 reads and <15ms @ P99 fully-indexed writes;Globally distributed with multi-region replication;Rich SQL queries over schema-agnostic automatic indexing;JavaScript language integrated multi-record ACID transactions with snapshot isolation;Well-defined tunable consistency models: Strong, Bounded Staleness, Session, and Eventual
Dynamic: Airflow pipelines are configuration as code (Python), allowing for dynamic pipeline generation. This allows for writting code that instantiate pipelines dynamically.;Extensible: Easily define your own operators, executors and extend the library so that it fits the level of abstraction that suits your environment.;Elegant: Airflow pipelines are lean and explicit. Parameterizing your scripts is built in the core of Airflow using powerful Jinja templating engine.;Scalable: Airflow has a modular architecture and uses a message queue to talk to orchestrate an arbitrary number of workers. Airflow is ready to scale to infinity.
Statistics
Stacks
594
Stacks
1.7K
Followers
1.1K
Followers
2.8K
Votes
130
Votes
128
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 28
    Best-of-breed NoSQL features
  • 22
    High scalability
  • 15
    Globally distributed
  • 14
    Automatic indexing over flexible json data model
  • 10
    Tunable consistency
Cons
  • 18
    Pricing
  • 4
    Poor No SQL query support
Pros
  • 53
    Features
  • 14
    Task Dependency Management
  • 12
    Cluster of workers
  • 12
    Beautiful UI
  • 10
    Extensibility
Cons
  • 2
    Observability is not great when the DAGs exceed 250
  • 2
    Running it on kubernetes cluster relatively complex
  • 2
    Open source - provides minimum or no support
  • 1
    Logical separation of DAGs is not straight forward
Integrations
Azure Machine Learning
Azure Machine Learning
MongoDB
MongoDB
Hadoop
Hadoop
Java
Java
Azure Functions
Azure Functions
Azure Container Service
Azure Container Service
Azure Storage
Azure Storage
Azure Websites
Azure Websites
Apache Spark
Apache Spark
Python
Python
No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Azure Cosmos DB, Airflow?

Amazon DynamoDB

Amazon DynamoDB

With it , you can offload the administrative burden of operating and scaling a highly available distributed database cluster, while paying a low price for only what you use.

Cloud Firestore

Cloud Firestore

Cloud Firestore is a NoSQL document database that lets you easily store, sync, and query data for your mobile and web apps - at global scale.

Cloudant

Cloudant

Cloudant’s distributed database as a service (DBaaS) allows developers of fast-growing web and mobile apps to focus on building and improving their products, instead of worrying about scaling and managing databases on their own.

GitHub Actions

GitHub Actions

It makes it easy to automate all your software workflows, now with world-class CI/CD. Build, test, and deploy your code right from GitHub. Make code reviews, branch management, and issue triaging work the way you want.

Google Cloud Bigtable

Google Cloud Bigtable

Google Cloud Bigtable offers you a fast, fully managed, massively scalable NoSQL database service that's ideal for web, mobile, and Internet of Things applications requiring terabytes to petabytes of data. Unlike comparable market offerings, Cloud Bigtable doesn't require you to sacrifice speed, scale, or cost efficiency when your applications grow. Cloud Bigtable has been battle-tested at Google for more than 10 years—it's the database driving major applications such as Google Analytics and Gmail.

Apache Beam

Apache Beam

It implements batch and streaming data processing jobs that run on any execution engine. It executes pipelines on multiple execution environments.

Google Cloud Datastore

Google Cloud Datastore

Use a managed, NoSQL, schemaless database for storing non-relational data. Cloud Datastore automatically scales as you need it and supports transactions as well as robust, SQL-like queries.

Zenaton

Zenaton

Developer framework to orchestrate multiple services and APIs into your software application using logic triggered by events and time. Build ETL processes, A/B testing, real-time alerts and personalized user experiences with custom logic.

CloudBoost

CloudBoost

CloudBoost.io is a database service for the “next web” - that not only does data-storage, but also search, real-time and a whole lot more which enables developers to build much richer apps with 50% less time saving them a ton of cost and helping them go to market much faster.

Luigi

Luigi

It is a Python module that helps you build complex pipelines of batch jobs. It handles dependency resolution, workflow management, visualization etc. It also comes with Hadoop support built in.

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