Insights show how Airflow is increasingly powering modern data products and enterprise AI, as well as its role as the connective tissue in a constantly-evolving, heterogenous technology stack
NEW YORK, Feb. 27, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Astronomer, the company behind Astro, the leading data orchestration and observability platform powered by Apache Airflow®, today announced the findings from its State of Airflow Report 2025. Based on responses from over 5,000 data practitioners - making it the largest data engineering survey to date - the report reveals the growing criticality of data orchestration in enterprise operations: from advanced analytics to revenue-generating, external-facing data products to production AI and MLOps.
Apache Airflow has firmly established itself as the industry standard for data orchestration, a position reinforced by its remarkable growth and widespread adoption. The State of Airflow Report 2025 clearly shows a surge in Airflow popularity, usage and community growth by taking a look at metrics from November of last year and the same time period in the year 2020, when the last major release–Airflow 2.0–came out. As of November 2024, Airflow saw:
- Tremendous increase in popularity: Airflow had more than 31M+ downloads in November 2024, compared to 888K+ in November 2020. In fact, there were more Airflow downloads in 2024 than all previous years combined.
- A growing contributor community: Airflow has 3,000+ Airflow contributors, compared to 1,300+ in November 2020. Airflow has the most contributors among all Apache Software Foundation open source projects, including others like Apache Kafka® and Apache Spark®.
- Increasing pull request volume: 29K+ pull requests in November 2024, compared to 10K+ in November 2020
- Exponential enterprise adoption: 77K+ organizations were using Airflow as of November 2024, compared to 25K+ in 2020.
This remarkable growth underscores both Airflow's increasing popularity among data professionals as well as its continual expansion of use, as organizations in every industry turn to Airflow to support more business functions.
"The State of Airflow Report 2025 confirms what we're seeing across industries - leveraging data effectively is becoming a competitive necessity," said Andy Byron, CEO, Astronomer. "Data orchestration has moved from a business need to a strategic imperative, serving as the backbone of modern enterprise infrastructure. With over 90% of data professionals citing Airflow as critical to their business, it's clear that orchestration is foundational for operationalizing data–fueling everything from advanced analytics to AI-driven innovation–and that Airflow is the standard for data orchestration."
Notable themes that emerged from the report include:
- Data platform diversity is the new multi-cloud - While market analysts may be looking for a clear winner in the cloud data platforms battle, enterprises have clearly chosen a multi-solution strategy–just like they earlier determined that multi-cloud would far outpace standardization on any single cloud provider. Snowflake (28%), Databricks (29%), and Google Cloud's BigQuery (27.6%) have nearly equal shares of adoption as enterprises move towards a heterogenous technology stack with Airflow as the connective tissue.
- Airflow is business-critical - Airflow isn't just extremely popular with data teams (90%+ recommendation rate), it's a core component of mission-critical data operations at leading enterprises. The majority of users in organizations with 50,000+ employees report driving business-critical workloads on Airflow.
- Airflow has extended beyond analytics - While Airflow remains a highly-effective framework for ETL and ELT–and it is still an excellent solution for advanced analytics and internal dashboards–it is rapidly evolving into a critical platform for deploying machine learning and generative AI solutions. Over 85% of surveyed users expect an increase in external or revenue-generating solutions built on Airflow in the next year.
- Orchestration-first organizations deliver production AI and ML - At a time when organizations in every industry are challenged with delivering a return on their AI investments, Airflow maturity and data orchestration foundations are key to getting AI and MLOps solutions in production. Among Airflow users with at least 5 years of experience, 30.6% run MLOps workloads on Airflow and 13.3% use Airflow for GenAI. Among Astronomer's Astro customers, 55% use Airflow for ML and AI. Among customers that have used Astro for 2+ years, the number jumps to 69%.
The complete State of Airflow Report 2025 has more findings around the growing role of data teams, how large enterprises are leveraging heterogenous tech stacks, and key trends around data orchestration.
To learn more and view the full report, visit the resources below:
- Download the complete State of Airflow Report 2025
- Dive deeper in this blog post
- Register for Astronomer's The State of Airflow 2025 webinar
- Read Astronomer CEO Andy Byron's thoughts on why orchestration and observability will redefine the modern data stack
- Try Astro now with a 14-day free trial
- Get started today with Astro Observe
About Astronomer
Astronomer empowers data teams to bring mission-critical software, analytics, and AI to life and is the company behind Astro, the industry-leading data orchestration and observability platform powered by Apache Airflow®. Astro accelerates building reliable data products that unlock insights, unleash AI value, and power data-driven applications. Trusted by more than 700 of the world's leading enterprises, Astronomer lets businesses do more with their data. To learn more, visit www.astronomer.io.
Apache® and Apache Airflow® are either registered trademarks or trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation in the United States and/or other countries. No endorsement by the Apache Software Foundation is implied by the use of these marks. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
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