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> - Don't use it for tasks that don't require idempotency (eg. a job that uses a bookmark).

You can totally design your tasks to be idempotent - but its up to you to make them that way. The scheduler or executor doesn't have any context into your job.

This is why I encourage people to use a unified base operator and then pass their own docker containers to it. Aka like how https://medium.com/bluecore-engineering/were-all-using-airfl... outlines it.

> - Don't use it for latency-sensitive jobs (this one should be obvious).

IIRC this is being addressed in Airflow 2.0

> - Don't use sensors or cross-DAG dependencies.

This is a little extreme. I've never ran into issues with cross dag dependencies or sensors. They make managing my DAGs way easier because wee can separate computation dags from loading dags.

context: I built/manage my company's Airflow platform. Everything is managed on k8s.



> You can totally design your tasks to be idempotent

Yes of course, I mean Airflow is not a good fit for the tasks you don't want to be idempotent (I think most but not all tasks should be idempotent).

> I've never ran into issues with cross dag dependencies

I believe Airflow docs advice against them when possible. I see why from my experience: less visibility and more complexity, especially for backfills.


> context: I built/manage my company's Airflow platform. Everything is managed on k8s

My team is running Airflow on a single node but we're slowly outgrowing this setup. We're considering running jobs on k8s.

Curious what's your setup like? Is your cluster of a fixed size or does it scale with the load?


Using the KubernetesPodOperator for everything adds a huge amount of overhead. You still need Airflow worker nodes, but they're just babysitting the K8S pods doing the real work.

I know it's 2020 and memory is cheap or whatever, but Airflow is shockingly wasteful of system resources.




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