E B O O K
How to
Accelerate AI
with Apache Airflow
Introduction
In the age of digital transformation, the Most enterprises, however, still struggle to properly harness the
majority of companies acknowledge vast amount of data being collected. According to one
that data is their most important asset MIT Technology Review Insights report, even as 96% of
employers believe that generative artificial intelligence (AI) will
in driving business and delivering value impact their business, only 9% of them have actually fully
to customers and stakeholders. They deployed an actual AI use case. With the worldwide market size
also agree that the modern enterprise for artificial intelligence expected to grow by 619% through 2030,
has become, at its core, a data the race is on for businesses to enhance their offerings with AI-
machine—and that modern data centric innovations. This growth will demand that modern
organizations take certain best practices into consideration to be
orchestration should form the central
able to fully operationalize and scale AI and machine learning
nervous system of that machine. (ML) initiatives.
Fortunately, opportunities exist for businesses to more
effectively orchestrate data, facilitate best practices, and
position data in their organizations to drive AI and ML
innovation. This presents itself in the form of modern tools like
the open-source workflow management platform Apache
Airflow. Read on to learn how modern enterprises are
successfully orchestrating their data and accelerating their AI
innovation with Apache Airflow.
2 • How to Accelerate AI with Apache Airflow EBOOK
Apache Airflow
Overview An ever-growing list of data integrations with the most prominent
applications, databases, tools, and cloud services has led to
Since its inception in 2014, Airflow has Airflow becoming the de facto standard for data workflows, and
risen to become the industry’s leading the glue that holds together the modern data stack for countless
workflow management platform for data businesses. Additionally, Airflow’s sizable and active open
pipelines. This is seen especially in community is 31,000+ members strong, ensuring the platform
recent years with the platform’s stays up to date with new and existing data sources and providers.
meteoric rise in adoption, with nearly More recently, Airflow has naturally expanded beyond the data
166 million downloads in 2023, a 67% engineering team to become the MLOps platform of choice for AI
year-over-year increase. And of all the and ML teams. Data scientists and machine learning engineers find
organizations running Airflow today, it ideally suited to kickstart and scale AI initiatives and standardize
best practices.
nearly 30% are using it to support
67%
AI initiatives.
Year-over-year
increase in downloads
of Apache Airflow
3 • How to Accelerate AI with Apache Airflow EBOOK
The Advancements
and Challenges of ML
The acceleration of AI requires all of the components of
traditional data pipelines and more—extract, transform, and load
(ETL) processes, data cleansing and feature generation, model
training and monitoring, not to mention invocations or fine tuning
of large language models (LLM)—and all of these components
run via data pipelines. These pipelines are essential to delivering
the advancements we’ve come to associate with AI, like ->
4 • How to Accelerate AI with Apache Airflow EBOOK
The Advancements and Challenges of ML
■︎ ︎ Personalized recommendations In particular, as part of the AI race, data
■︎ ︎ Content generation and text engineering and ML teams are being told to
summarization build LLM applications as fast as possible,
while remaining compliant with ethical,
■︎ ︎ Predictive maintenance corporate, and legal standards. However,
■︎ ︎ Sentiment analysis even as these teams realize how critical it is
■︎ ︎ Chatbots for customer support for data and model pipelines to be
coordinated and centralized, they often
■︎ ︎ Fraud detection and risk struggle to manage and maintain these
assessment in financial services pipelines—and effectively implement ML—
■︎ ︎ Marketing optimization and for the four following reasons ->
customer segmentation
■︎ ︎ Supply chain optimization and
demand forecasting
5 • How to Accelerate AI with Apache Airflow EBOOK
The Advancements and Challenges of ML
Isolated Development
Lack of Coordination
1. and Deployment 2. and Standardization
Analytics originated as a research activity rather than an operational Even when models find their way to production, the teams involved
discipline, and so, even today, data science and ML tend to be in the implementation of ML come up with their own different
developed in silos. This complicates things when it’s time for the processes, approaches, and technologies. Each group has its own
notebook of an individual data scientist to make the transition to set of metrics and features, resulting in inconsistencies and costly
full-fledged production services. LLMs in particular enjoy an duplication of effort. Without a centralized location for these diverse
abundance of enthusiasm as prototypes, only to experience a teams to coordinate and collaborate, standardized best practices,
dearth of production-ready practices later. Too often, time and testing, and documentation rarely take shape. Instead, the
resources are wasted, as far too many AI apps that began life in a development environment becomes a chaotic free-for-all where
hackathon fail to reach production or external use. outputs are often unreliable, inaccurate, and prone to failure,
exposing the company to risk.
At best, the positive impact of AI innovations is lessened by a lack of
focus. At worst, low-quality models that reach production can end
up resulting in a degraded end user and customer experience or
even misleading information.
6 • How to Accelerate AI with Apache Airflow EBOOK
The Advancements and Challenges of ML
Overwhelming Technology Operational and
3. Landscape 4. Compliance Hurdles
Data science and ML teams are inundated with an ever-multiplying Technical challenges aside, data science and ML teams grapple with
swarm of technology options—from experiment tracking to feature issues that come with day 2 operations, from provisioning to compute
storage to model registries, interacting with a thousand ML libraries, costs to managing failures (i.e., monitoring, alerting, troubleshooting),
running on GPUs and containers, integrated with upstream observability, auditing, access controls, upgrades, and more. As long
databases and downstream applications. In part this necessarily as teams operate in a siloed, fragmented environment, reining in
reflects the multidisciplinary aspect of machine learning. It’s also the these challenges becomes virtually impossible.
result of a still-evolving array of vendors, open-source solutions,
Equally challenging are the tasks of ensuring data privacy and
and technologies, each of which targets a specific niche.
navigating compliance for predictive analytics. Businesses should
With the pressure to get the most accurate prediction, data always know how each prediction was produced—by which model,
scientists are more likely than software engineers to use whatever on which dataset it was trained, by which transformations it was
tools they can get their hands on — but they are less likely to have generated, from which sources it was ingested, and by whom.
the patience or skill to integrate and maintain them. But the lesson Unfortunately, getting the answers to these questions grows
of data orchestration is that pipelines must be centralized, exponentially more difficult with each new component and
standardized, and coordinated. technology that teams introduce to the data stack.
Furthermore, they know they need to ensure their platform is
compliant with regulations like GDPR and HIPAA. In practice, however,
with so many moving parts and diverse technologies involved, data
leaders are hard-pressed to actually fulfill these requirements,
exposing their business to additional risk.
7 • How to Accelerate AI with Apache Airflow EBOOK
How to Overcome
Barriers to AI Innovation
Fortunately, mature businesses are finding that
these four challenges can be overcome—and they
can rapidly harness the potential of AI and natural
language processing and accelerate innovation—
when they commit to three critical strategies ->
8 • How to Accelerate AI with Apache Airflow EBOOK
How to Overcome Barriers to AI Innovation
Choose a Centralized Framework Invest in the
1. for Coordinating all Data Pipelines 2. Right Integrations
The successful delivery of AI innovations depends on The data foundation described above relies heavily on the ability to
the transparency, reliability, and efficiency of well- integrate seamlessly with the various applications, databases, tools, and
architected ML Operations—the many steps in the cloud services that make up the modern data stack. Standardizing on the
process of data preparation, feature engineering, model right integrations and having a platform that makes it easy for developers
training, and monitoring. In order for ML teams to to utilize in a coordinated way, from development to production, and to
ensure that each step is executed successfully and cater to evolving business demands is paramount.
efficiently, at the right moment in time according to
An ideal platform should support all the main components (traditional ETL,
complex dependencies with many points of failure, they
data quality, feature stores, model training and deployment) and platforms
need an orchestration framework.
(warehouses, data lakes, vector databases, LLM services) used by data
Successful delivery also requires a platform that teams. It should always be up to date as those platforms change and new
facilitates hand-in-hand collaboration between data ones arise, and allow for custom integrations.
engineering, data science, and ML teams across
Simultaneously, however, these integrations should balance the
everything from managing traditional data pipelines to
orchestration needs of ML engineers, data engineers, and data scientists
coordinating feature development to building AI
with the unique requirements and tools each prefers to work in, with
applications. Such a platform should also support best
seamless interoperability among distributed resources of all kinds, from
practices and promote developer productivity. When
on-prem resources that exchange data with host-based or client server
businesses successfully invest in and pursue this
interfaces to cloud services that use APIs for data exchange.
strategy, AI development is not just accelerated, but
also brought to production with few to no errors.
When businesses invest in robust integrations, they provide their teams
with powerful tools to collaborate, orchestrate, and ensure data reliability
so they can efficiently and confidently take AI innovations to production
again and again.
9 • How to Accelerate AI with Apache Airflow EBOOK
How to Overcome Barriers to AI Innovation
Leverage
3. Data Lineage
Data reliability in AI applications is only as good as an
organization’s ability to clearly trace the historical path of the
data, starting with data ingestion and the model development
process. Data lineage tracks data as it moves from the source
system to different forms of persistence and transformations to
its consumption by an application or analytics model. Ideally, the
business’ platform performs this task independently in the
background, without relying on developers to do the right thing or
add specific code.
With nonexistent or patchy data lineage, troubleshooting,
governance, and validation become difficult or impossible. On the
other hand, a comprehensive lineage system empowers teams to
confidently troubleshoot issues, validate results, maintain
governance, and establish reliability and trustworthiness in their
AI applications. It’s also essential for auditing.
10 • How to Accelerate AI with Apache Airflow EBOOK
How Astronomer Unlocks
the Full Power of Airflow to
Accelerate AI Innovation
As mentioned earlier, ML teams are adopting Airflow as an orchestration
platform that meets many of the requirements of ML operations, including
those listed above. For all its strengths, however, it can be difficult to
manage a platform as sophisticated as Airflow, especially once it expands
to multiple teams, specifically in regard to scaling AI initiatives.
Astronomer
Data Science
Workspace
Home
Filter by DAG name 205 DAGs Refreshed a few seconds ago Sort by
Astronomer is a unified data platform built on Apache Airflow
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that enhances efficiency and reach, providing a central place
Deployments 2 billing_checks data_quality monitoring billing 2 more
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S CH E D U L E DEPLOYMENT OWNER(S)
where data and ML engineers can meet to bridge the gap
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between their teams, collaborate, orchestrate their data, and
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accelerate their organization’s AI initiatives. With these
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capabilities, businesses can ->
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11 • How Astronomer Unlocks AI Innovation EBOOK
Unify and Standardize Development Support Next-Generation
Practices for Production-Ready AI Applications with Unmatched
Astronomer supports the entire AI lifecycle, from prototype to production, Compute Power
with its unified and standardized environment for AI development. The Astronomer offers the largest compute power in the
platform also drives collaboration between data and ML engineers across managed-Airflow market, twice as much as the nearest
traditional data pipelines, preparing ML for production, and building AI competitor, making it ideal for businesses that are looking to
applications on Airflow. Astronomer also provides a common framework scale up their AI workloads. In addition, other features let
and enforces best practices for all teams to unite around and effectively organizations stay efficient and cost-effective as they scale.
orchestrate the development and deployment via integrated IDE and CI/ For instance, the worker queue feature enables teams to
CD (continuous integration and continuous delivery/deployment) and dedicate larger machine types to their heaviest workloads.
pluggable compute. Additionally, it includes complete monitoring, alerting,
and data lineage, guaranteeing enterprise-grade uptime to minimize the
risk of costly AI operation outages.
CASE STUDY CASE STUDY
How Anastasia delivers AI-powered Laurel’s timekeeping transformation
insights with Astro with AI and Airflow
Learn more -> Learn more ->
12 • How to Accelerate AI with Apache Airflow EBOOK
Ensure AI Trustworthiness
Accelerate AI Development with
with Data Lineage Seamless Integrations
Astronomer automates the extraction and analysis of lineage metadata. Airflow has hundreds of integrations with almost all components
Armed with this data, the platform’s Lineage view gives data science of the modern data stack, and the Astronomer Registry provides
and ML teams clear visibility into the origins and transformations of a curated library of providers with examples and documentation.
data, to improve troubleshooting, aid in the validation of results, and This includes integrations with tools and platforms that support
enhance the overall reliability of AI models.
AI use cases and empower organizations to harness the full
potential of LLMs and AI out of the box — examples include
Astronomer’s lineage metadata also puts the information into OpenAI, Cohere, Weaviate, Pinecone, Pgvector, OpenSearch, and
organizations’ hands to effectively govern their data. It enables CAOs, frameworks like SageMaker and AzureML.
CDOs, data stewards, and others to pinpoint silos and safeguard
sensitive data, so they can effectively bring practices into compliance Integration with leading providers accelerates the AI
with regulatory requirements and ensure data is reused responsibly. development process by easing integration complexity. Data
Features like Day 2 Ops, comprehensive monitoring and alerting, and engineers and scientists can effortlessly leverage diverse
lineage guarantee that compliance will continue to be maintained. technologies, focusing on building impactful models and
applications without the usual interoperability challenges, making
it easier to get AI into production.
13 • How to Accelerate AI with Apache Airflow EBOOK
Ready to accelerate
AI Innovation?
Operationalize and scale AI and ML initiatives, unlock the
full power of Airflow to deliver production-ready AI, and
accelerate workflow development with Astronomer.
Power your next big AI project.
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