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.