Unlocking Event-Driven Scheduling in Airflow 3: A New Era of Reactive Data Pipelines

Airflow 3 introduces a major evolution in orchestration: native support for external event-driven scheduling. In this talk, I’ll share the journey behind AIP-82—why we needed it, how we built it, and what it unlocks. I’ll dive into how the new AssetWatcher enables pipelines to respond immediately to events like file arrivals, API calls, or pub/sub messages. You’ll see how this drastically reduces latency and infrastructure overhead while improving reactivity and resource efficiency. We’ll explore how it works under the hood, real-world use cases, best practices, and migration tips for teams ready to shift from time-based to event-driven workflows. If you’re looking to make your Airflow DAGs more dynamic, this is the talk that shows you how. Whether you’re an operator or contributor, you’ll walk away with a deep understanding of one of Airflow 3’s most impactful features.