Supercharging Apache Airflow: Enhancing Core Components with Rust

Apache Airflow is a powerful workflow orchestrator, but as workloads grow, its Python-based components can become performance bottlenecks. This talk explores how Rust, with its speed, safety, and concurrency advantages, can enhance Airflow’s core components (e.g, scheduler, DAG processor, etc). We’ll dive into the motivations behind using Rust, architectural trade-offs, and the challenges of bridging the gap between Python and Rust. A proof-of-concept showcasing an Airflow scheduler rewritten in Rust will demonstrate the potential benefits of this approach.