An Airflow Story: Cleaning and Visualizing Our Github Data

Astronomer, a data engineering company, navigated frequent changes in its product direction and market focus, which resulted in a chaotic organizational structure within its GitHub repositories. To address this, the company leveraged Apache Airflow, a data workflow management system that allows developers to schedule, deploy, and monitor data pipelines as directed acyclic graphs (DAGs). By using Airflow, Astronomer could efficiently clean and organize its GitHub data, transferring it to Amazon S3 and then to Redshift for further analysis. This process involved custom Airflow hooks and operators to interact with external systems like the GitHub API, making data management more streamlined. The company also utilized tools like Prometheus and Grafana for monitoring and visualization. Through this setup, Astronomer improved its internal reporting and created dashboards for visualizing data, ultimately showcasing the effectiveness of Airflow in resolving complex data management challenges.