As Apache Airflow surpasses 3,000 contributors, Astronomer makes deeper investment to power business-critical data pipelines and AI initiatives across the region
Astronomer, the company behind Astro, the leading data orchestration and observability platform powered by Apache Airflow®, today announced it is expanding its EMEA presence, with plans to establish a permanent regional office soon. This strategic expansion is driven by the mature Airflow market in the region, the growing demand for Astro, and the company’s commitment to serving existing EMEA customers, such as Booking.com and Pleo.
Astronomer customers in EMEA will benefit from increased localized support and the wider Airflow community will see increased activity from Astronomer in the region. The company already has key Apache Airflow committers and engineers based across EMEA to enable customers to maximize the value of their Airflow investments and assist upcoming data initiatives. Astronomer just announced the private preview of Astro Observe, which allows any team using Airflow to now have access to an actionable view of the data supply chain and extends Astronomer beyond data orchestration into a platform for data operations. Additionally, Astronomer recently released dbt on Astro, marking the first platform expansion beyond Airflow and providing customers with a fully-managed method to deploy dbt and Airflow together.
“Data is the primary building block of analytics and AI, and drives the competitive advantage for the modern enterprise,” said Andy Byron, CEO, Astronomer. “Everything we do at Astronomer ensures that our customers are able to leverage their data to be the difference maker in executing their business strategy. This further commitment to EMEA means our current and future customers in the region will see world-class support for whatever their data strategy might be.”
Airflow is the industry’s de-facto standard for expressing pipelines and orchestrating data flows as code. Created at Airbnb as an open-source project in 2014, Airflow was brought into the Apache Software Incubator Program in 2016 and announced as a Top-Level Apache Project in 2019. Now, Airflow is widely recognized as the industry’s leading and most advanced workflow management and orchestration solution.
“Booking.com previously relied on OSS Airflow for our ML and analytics workflows, but quickly found that we required additional enterprise-grade features that only Astro could provide,” said Huy Dao, Director of Data Machine Learning Platform, Booking.com. “Astronomer has been a key partner in helping with the management of our data infrastructure, especially as we use Airflow for many GenAI initiatives like our AI Trip Planner. The scalability of our data systems along with the ability to enforce workflow ownership were key challenges and Astronomer has delivered on both those needs.”
Airflow has surpassed over 3,000 contributors, a higher total than other popular Apache open source software like Apache Spark® and Apache Kafka®. EMEA represents over 3.6 million monthly Airflow downloads, a figure that has continued to grow over time. This is consistent with the exponential growth noted in the 2024 State of Apache Airflow report, which found that last year Airflow saw a 67% year-over-year growth in annual Airflow downloads.
“As Astronomer has grown its investment in EMEA, I’ve seen two common themes emerge in early discussions with customers,” said Phil Duggan, EMEA Regional Vice President, Astronomer. “First, customers want a strategy that enables their business to move faster, to improve the reliability and trust of their data products, while accelerating development velocity and containing costs. Second, organizations want to put their data to work to gain a competitive edge in the evolving generative AI landscape and event-driven use cases. We are excited to help more EMEA companies tackle these common challenges with Astro, the only platform for complete orchestration of pipelines and data products they produce.”
“EMEA has continued to be a hotbed for Airflow innovation and broad adoption, so we are excited to expand Astronomer’s presence in the region to better serve our customers,” said Kaxil Naik, Senior Director of Engineering, Astronomer and Apache Airflow PMC Member & Core Committer. “Astro’s enterprise-grade features enables companies to place Airflow at the core of their data operations, ensuring the reliable delivery of mission-critical data pipelines and products, while also navigating Europe’s complex regulatory landscape, including compliance with emerging regulations like the Cyber Resilience Act.”
To receive a free Airflow health check from Astronomer, click here and visit the resources below.
Further Resources:
- Register for the upcoming Airflow Forum in London on October 3
- Visit Astronomer’s booth X446 at Big Data London this week, September 18-19
- Receive a free Airflow Health Check
- Download Astronomer’s white paper on Full-stack Orchestration in the Age of the Data Product
- Try Astro now with a 14-day Free Trial
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