February 2023 Summaries

Authorized Workspaces is a new feature in Astro by Astronomer that enhances the existing Workspace functionality by allowing users to authorize specific workspaces to designated clusters within their data planes, thereby isolating teams or projects and providing greater control over Astro deployments. This feature is particularly useful for separating production from non-production environments, ensuring sensitive deployments are accessible only to specific users, and preventing untested code from running on production resources. It facilitates a decentralized approach, allowing teams to access only the necessary resources to create and maintain data products, while ensuring compliance with security standards and best practices. Authorized Workspaces streamline the management and scaling of Astro resources and promote the safe implementation of federated data layers, making it easier to integrate Astro’s orchestration capabilities into various cloud-native architectures. The feature also simplifies the process of authorizing workspaces through the Astro UI, offering a straightforward wizard to manage cluster authorizations for existing and new workspaces.

Astro has introduced the Kubernetes (K8s) Executor, now available in Private Preview, allowing users to select this option in the Astro UI when creating a deployment. Users can easily switch an existing deployment to the Kubernetes Executor, and different deployments within a workspace or cluster can run on various executors. The K8s Executor offers benefits such as task isolation by running each task in its own Kubernetes Pod, eliminating dependency conflicts and noisy neighbor issues, and allowing for specific CPU and memory resource requests per task. Additionally, it simplifies operations with auto-scaling task pods, removing the need for configuring concurrency. Existing customers interested in accessing the Private Preview can contact the Astro team, while those interested in learning more are encouraged to schedule a demo.