Astronomer Astro Data Orchestration Platform Debuts

June 10, 2022

Astronomer released Astro, a modern data orchestration platform powered by Apache Airflow, on Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, with Microsoft Azure support slated for this summer. The platform improves the open-source Airflow experience to help teams make sense of their data ecosystem, build faster, and reduce their operational management and risk.

"Data engineers have one of the hardest jobs in a company, as the demand for timely, trusted data only increases each day," said Joe Otto, Astronomer CEO. "As the commercial steward of the Apache Airflow project for more than four years, we've seen thousands of Airflow environments and deeply understand the challenges that teams face when integrating and managing data at scale. We have taken those learnings to build Astro, a product that is as easy to use as it is to get started."

Astro empowers data teams of all sizes and at every stage of their data orchestration journey. Data orchestration seeks to break down silos to make data accessible across an entire organization, enabling teams to make critical business decisions with trusted data. Early data orchestration practices rely on disconnected, error-prone processes that result in considerable time and financial losses. Astro automates and simplifies every step of data orchestration, deployed as a fully managed service in your cloud.

Red Ventures, a global media company that has built a portfolio of influential brands including CNET, Healthline, and Lonely Planet, uses Astro in its Red Digital group to power the flow of data and understand and optimize customer journeys on behalf of its customers.

"I want our engineers to focus on data pipelines that benefit our customers, not managing Airflow or building an orchestration platform," said Jason Rich, director of data engineering at Red Ventures. "When I consider the alternatives, the productivity they get with Astro and the Airflow experts at Astronomer saves Red Ventures more than $500k each year."

Astro is cloud-optimized for security, reliability, efficiency and performance. The platform provides end-to-end observability across environments, regions and clouds, with these notable features and capabilities:

Eliminate 80% of upfront, manual boilerplate code through a next generation pipeline authoring experience
Astro software development kit (SDK), providing a set of building blocks to bring data awareness into users' pipelines

A differentiated, auto-scaling Runtime that takes the guesswork out of configuring Airflow to achieve optimal performance

In-place Airflow upgrades with Day-1 support on the latest releases, which no other solution can offer
A central user interface that displays the health and resource consumption of deployments in a single place
Enterprise-grade access management, connectivity and hardening

Global support and customer success programs, including training and professional services, backed by the core developers of Airflow