Apache Airflow is an open-source orchestration tool designed to programmatically author, schedule, and monitor complex workflows, from simple scripts to machine learning pipelines. It treats workflows as software, allowing them to be version-controlled, tested, and collaborated on effectively. Airflow’s core concept is the Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG), which defines tasks and their dependencies, ensuring tasks run in the correct order. Workflows are written in Python, offering flexibility and ease of use for developers familiar with the language. Key principles of Airflow include being dynamic, allowing pipelines to be generated programmatically; scalable, with a modular architecture designed to distribute tasks across multiple workers; extensible, enabling custom operators and hooks; and elegant, promoting lean, clear, and explicit pipeline code. The platform features a robust web UI for monitoring, managing, and triggering workflows, offering visual insights through DAGs, graphs, and grids, which is a significant improvement over traditional command-line scheduling. Airflow integrates with numerous services across major cloud providers, databases, and messaging systems. For production use, Airflow requires a Linux environment and a robust database like PostgreSQL or MySQL, moving beyond local development setups using SQLite. The project follows semantic versioning for predictability and actively manages dependencies to ensure stability, making it a reliable standard for complex automation tasks that need to be maintainable and observable.

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