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by tchiotludo 1544 days ago
I don't pitch as more complicated version of Airflow, rather, I think it's more simple than Airflow on the UX side: we use declarative flow with yaml and not python code that can be

I agree with you that Kafka & ElasticSearch can be a pain to scale if you need to have a horizontal and vertical scaling.

On other side, on single machine, it's really has easy to setup. With this, you will have the same scaling than Airflow for exemple since it depend on a non scalable database (mysql or postgres). But the chance you will have with Kestra is that you will be able to scale to multiple node for your backend (as well with kestra that allow scaling all services). When you hit the limit with standard database, you will be stuck.

And yes clearly infinite scale is not a literal statement terms, nothing can scale infinitely but since the architecture is really robust (and scalable), the issues will be on other aspects than Kestra (cloud limit, database overload, ...).

A final point and a more important one, the backend are all pluggagle in Kestra since Kestra is really think as module: Look at the directory here : https://github.com/kestra-io/kestra :

- runner-kafka & runner-memory are 2 implementation of Kestra, you can add a new one that will use Redis, Pulsar, ...

- repository-elasticsearch & repository-memory is the same, you can implement another one, I started one implementation for JDBC that I don't have the time to finish for now : https://github.com/kestra-io/kestra/pull/368

2 comments

But using a proper programming language to define dependencies is one of airflow's main advantages! I'd even go so far as to say you're not using it to its full potential if you're not writing code to infer complicated dependencies programmatically.
I don't think that with "standard databases" you get "stuck". But I do buy that they're harder to scale