Introducing Dagster External Assets

Dagster External Assets provide a solution to enable the adoption of Dagster as a "single pane of glass" for data platforms without requiring a wholesale migration of all scheduling and orchestration infrastructure. This feature enables teams to model data assets that are not scheduled and orchestrated by Dagster, allowing them to leverage Dagster's metadata capabilities independently from its orchestrator. External Assets can be declared in a declarative fashion within Dagster, providing a clean separation between the orchestration and metadata layers. The primary goal of External Assets is to enable seamless integration with existing platforms and stakeholders without requiring synchronous migration of all infrastructure. This feature provides value by enabling system of record for metadata, alerting, cross-cutting data lineage, data quality, and scheduling capabilities, while also providing an incremental pathway for adoption.