Airflow vs Azure Storage: 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 Storage is detailed as "Reliable, economical cloud storage for data big and small". Azure Storage provides the flexibility to store and retrieve large amounts of unstructured data, such as documents and media files with Azure Blobs; structured nosql based data with Azure Tables; reliable messages with Azure Queues, and use SMB based Azure Files for migrating on-premises applications to the cloud.
Airflow belongs to "Workflow Manager" category of the tech stack, while Azure Storage can be primarily classified under "Cloud Storage".
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 Storage provides the following key features:
- Blobs, Tables, Queues, and Files
- Highly scalable
- Durable & highly available
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.
Starbucks, Yammer, and Microsoft are some of the popular companies that use Azure Storage, whereas Airflow is used by Slack, Repro, and WePay. Azure Storage has a broader approval, being mentioned in 82 company stacks & 42 developers stacks; compared to Airflow, which is listed in 70 company stacks and 30 developer stacks.