🚀 Apache Airflow 3.0: The Future of Workflow Orchestration Is Here

Apache Airflow 3.0 has officially launched, marking the most significant update in the platform's history. After four years of development, this release introduces transformative features that enhance flexibility, scalability, and user experience for data engineers and developers alike.

🔑 Key Features in Airflow 3.0

1. Service-Oriented Architecture

Airflow 3.0 adopts a service-oriented architecture, introducing a new Task Execution API and airflow api-server. This design enables task execution in remote environments, offering improved isolation and flexibility.

2. Edge Executor

The new Edge Executor supports distributed, event-driven, and edge-compute workflows, catering to modern data processing needs.

3. Stable DAG Authoring Interface

A stable DAG authoring interface is now available, with core DAG constructs like @dag, @task, and DAG accessible through the new airflow.sdk namespace, promoting consistency and ease of use.

4. Scheduler-Managed Backfills

Backfills are now scheduled and tracked like regular DAG runs, with native UI and API support, enhancing control and observability.

5. DAG Versioning

Airflow now tracks structural changes to DAGs over time, enabling inspection of historical DAG definitions via the UI and API, a highly requested feature by the community.

6. Asset-Based Scheduling

The dataset model has been redesigned as assets, introducing a new @asset decorator and cleaner event-driven DAG definitions, aligning with modern data orchestration practices.

📈 Why Upgrade to Airflow 3.0?

With over 30 million monthly downloads and adoption by 80,000 organizations, Airflow has become a cornerstone in data workflow management. The 3.0 release addresses the evolving needs of data teams, supporting use cases from traditional ETL to MLOps and GenAI workflows.

🛠️ Preparing for the Upgrade

• Python Compatibility: Ensure your environment is running Python 3.9 or higher, as older versions are no longer supported.

• Standard Providers: Install the apache-airflow-providers-standard package, as commonly used operators have been moved out of the core package.

• Configuration Updates: Utilize the airflow config update utility to align your configurations with Airflow 3.0 standards.

For a comprehensive overview of all the new features and improvements, check out the official Airflow 3.0 release blog.