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by edumucelli 1422 days ago
More recent tools such as Dagster and Prefect have much more to offer. One simple example is communication between tasks. Airflow has a clunky system for that called XCom. The actual author of XCom says you probably should not use it due to the level of hackery it has under the hood [1]:

On Dagster and Prefect you communicate between tasks as if you were writing pure Python. On Airflow on the other hand ...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlawR_gi8-Y&t=740s

2 comments

I'm not sure if linking to a talk from 2018 in 2022 for a project that is being actively worked on (a bunch of Python abstractions for xcom were added in 2.0) is fair.
Yes, curious if the Taskflow API introduced as part of Airflow 2.0 reduces this pain. It appears much easier/saner than working with XCOMs directly - less coupling and removes the need for lots of boilerplate code.
There's also Flyte, which is natively data aware and schedules tasks around data dependencies. The syntax is essentially pure python too.