Astronomer delivers business-critical data with Microsoft Azure

Organizations depend on data to power their applications, run critical processes, produce analytics, and deliver AI. However, teams struggle to deliver data reliably, scale their use of data, and implement governance and control. Astronomer, a leading Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform, provides a modern, enterprise-ready data orchestration platform powered by Apache Airflow. Together with Microsoft Azure, they are bringing this solution to Azure as a native service available to all Azure customers.

Building data pipelines

Astronomer is a leading data platform. The company's mission is to deliver the world’s data. Astronomer stewards Apache Airflow, the de facto standard for expressing data flows as code and the central control point in the modern data stack. However, Astronomer realized that data engineers needed more beyond the open source project. 

“Apache Airflow dramatically changed the way data pipelines were being developed before Apache Airflow pipelines were actually created, generally point to point with very limited flexibility,” says Vikram Koka, SVP of Engineering, Astronomer. 

In order to solve this need, Astronomer partnered with Microsoft Azure. Astronomer recognized that this partnership would allow its joint customers to take advantage of the fully-managed data orchestration platform, and performance, security, and availability required to run business-critical data workloads. 

Running data seamlessly

Astronomer’s key offering is Astro. It’s a modern data orchestration platform, built on top of Apache Airflow, that enables teams to unify their data on a fully-managed platform and power their business-critical data applications.

This partnership introduces Astro as the exclusive Airflow service on Azure. As an Azure-native service, it provides Azure customers with a fully managed Airflow solution they can access easily. Astro offers seamless 1-click signup and a deep 1st-party integration with the Azure ecosystem. It simplifies the deployment and management of Airflow workflows in Azure.

This partnership is exclusively for Azure customers who need production-ready workflow orchestration. It's valuable for any organization seeking an integrated and hassle-free Airflow solution on Azure.

“The partnership with Microsoft...has been fantastic. In addition to that, we let our customers run their own data pipelines on Azure. So, for Azure customers of ours, we want to provide a first-class experience in terms of letting them get easy access to their data sources on Azure,” explains Conor Beverland, Senior Director of Product Management, Astronomer.

Deployed and secured

Astronomer's platform, Astro, is designed to simplify the process of running and managing Airflow. It provides a managed service that reduces the overhead associated with maintaining Airflow, allowing data teams to focus on building and running data pipelines. Astro provides an intelligent infrastructure layer, ensuring that data pipelines can run efficiently at scale. It also offers a suite of developer tools that make it easy to write, test, and deploy data pipelines.

“We provide a bunch of tools to make the developer productivity experience first class, including a really nice, out-of-the-box local developer experience that helps you ensure that the pipelines that you're building on top of Airflow will run reliably in production,” Beverland says.

Microsoft Azure helped alleviate pain points through seamless integration and effortless setup. Astro's 1st-party integration with Azure streamlines workflow deployment and management for Azure users, reducing the complexity of setting up Airflow in an Azure environment.

The cloud-native experience simplifies the process of getting started with Airflow, saving users time and effort in connecting to their cloud ecosystem.

Artificial Intelligence: orchestrating MLOps on Astro

Astro is key to delivering AI Applications, sitting as the core orchestrator of Machine Learning Operations (MLOps). Machine Learning (ML) has never been more top-of-mind but is challenging to implement. Astro brings all of this together as the central platform where data engineers and ML engineers meet. Astro offers a complete and secure data foundation for faster development of production-ready AI, seamless integrations with leading AI tools, and the lineage you need to trust your AI applications.

Astronomer looks forward to partnering with Microsoft Azure to roll out more features to accelerate the development of next-gen data use cases.

“I think that joint solution is truly valuable for any organization which is looking for a secure, efficient, and fully integrated Apache flow solution. I think that adding the Astronomer native capabilities to the Azure platform offers unprecedented opportunities to our joint customers,” says Radina Mihaleva, Partnership Lead at Astronomer.

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