Apache Airflow vs. Apache Hadoop

For a quick job scanning of status and deep-diving into job issues, details, and flows, AirFlow does a good job. No fuss, no muss. The low learning curve as the UI is very straightforward, and navigating it will be familiar after spending some time using it. Our requirements are pretty simple. Job scheduler, workflows, and monitoring. The jobs we run are >100, but still is a lot to review and troubleshoot when jobs don't run. So when managing large jobs, AirFlow dated UI can be a bit of a drawback.

Incentivized

Apache Hadoop (and its subsequent add-ons) are well-suited to larger, unstructured data flows, such as aggregation of web traffic or advertising. Geospatial algorithms and their outputs are well-suited for this kind of aggregation as structuring that data is challenging, but leaving it unstructured and performing queries as-needed is a better fit for most business models. With the advent of data science, I would expect Hadoop fits a LOT of their initial outputs quite well.

Incentivized

• Apache Airflow is one of the best Orchestration platforms and a go-to scheduler for teams building a data platform or pipelines.
• Apache Airflow supports multiple operators, such as the Databricks, Spark, and Python operators. All of these provide us with functionality to implement any business logic.
• Apache Airflow is highly scalable, and we can run a large number of DAGs with ease. It provided HA and replication for workers. Maintaining airflow deployments is very easy, even for smaller teams, and we also get lots of metrics for observability.

Incentivized

• HDFS is reliable and solid, and in my experience with it, there are very few problems using it
• Enterprise support from different vendors makes it easier to 'sell' inside an enterprise
• It provides High Scalability and Redundancy
• Horizontal scaling and distributed architecture

Incentivized

• A local "dry run" or IDE plugin that can validate and simulate DAG execution without needing a full environment.
• Better feedback on DAG parse errors in the UI or CLI.
• Navigating large DAGs with hundreds of tasks can be slow and hard to understand visually.

Incentivized

• Hadoop is a batch oriented processing framework, it lacks real time or stream processing.
• Hadoop's HDFS file system is not a POSIX compliant file system and does not work well with small files, especially smaller than the default block size.
• Hadoop cannot be used for running interactive jobs or analytics.

Incentivized

Hadoop is organization-independent and can be used for various purposes ranging from archiving to reporting and can make use of economic, commodity hardware. There is also a lot of saving in terms of licensing costs - since most of the Hadoop ecosystem is available as open-source and is free

For its capability to connect with multicloud environments. Access Control management is something that we don't get in all the schedulers and orchestrators. But although it provides so many flexibility and options to due to python , some level of knowledge of python is needed to be able to build workflows.

Incentivized

Great! Hadoop has an easy to use interface that mimics most other data warehouses. You can access your data via SQL and have it display in a terminal before exporting it to your business intelligence platform of choice. Of course, for smaller data sets, you can also export it to Microsoft Excel.

Incentivized

We went with a third party for support, i.e., consultant. Had we gone with Azure or Cloudera, we would have obtained support directly from the vendor. my rating is more on the third party we selected and doesn't reflect the overall support available for Hadoop. I think we could have done better in our selection process, however, we were trying to use an already approved vendor within our organization. There is plenty of self-help available for Hadoop online.

Incentivized

Hadoop is a complex topic and best suited for classrom training. Online training are a waste of time and money.

Apache Airflow is suited for a much wider set of use cases compared to Databricks. You can run it anywhere, and there is also no vendor lock-in. With Airflow, we can utilize almost any compute engine. Same thing we want to do with Databricks. There might be some level of difficulty based on the support.

Incentivized

I feel that this is a highly reliable and scalable solution computing technology that is highly capable of processing large data sets across multiple servers and thousands of machines in a well-defined and distributed manner. Apache Hadoop can automatically scale up the number of servers and machines that are needed to process, store, and analyze data sets. It also handles explosions in data with big data technology. Apache Hadoop is good at handling all node failures as well.

Incentivized

• Most of the ETL processes were automated, cutting down on human labor.
• Apache Airflow's user interface (UI) was very informative and straightforward.
• Since ETL processes were providing data via airflow, we were able to gain a deeper comprehension of the data at hand.

Incentivized

• As it was open source makes it popular choice for handling large chuck of datasets
• It was free earlier but now it’s licensed but still enterprise is a fine tuned version which makes it easier for new users and administrators to use it
• Our investment is worth every single penny.
• Initial cost is more as you might need to hire administrators to setup the cluster and make them in scalable. But once done it’s pretty easy

Incentivized