Airflow on Kubernetes: Containerizing your workflows

Presented by Michael Hewitt at Airflow Summit 2020.

At Nielsen Digital we have been moving our ETLs to containerized environments managed by Kubernetes. We have successfully transferred some of our ETLs to this environment in production. In order to do this we used the following technologies: Helm to easily deploy Airflow on to Kubernetes; Airflow’s Kubernetes Executor to take full advantage Kubernetes features; and Airflow’s Kubernetes Pod Operator in order to execute our containerized Tasks within our DAGs. To automate a lot of the deployment process we also used Terraform. Lastly, Kubernetes features were used to gain much more fine grained control of Airflows infrastructure.