Airflow shifted from analytics dashboards to mission-critical operational workloads
Viraj Parekh · He killed a $100K ARR product & pivoted—then raised $375M. | Viraj Parekh, Co-Founder of Astronomer · PMF Show · Dec 18, 2025 · at 25:39
Viraj Parekh, co-founder of Astronomer, describes how enterprise adoption and usage patterns for Apache Airflow evolved over time.
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“In the early days, Airflow was used for very, what I call analytics workloads, as in the sense that it would move data around, and ultimately, the end result would be a number in a dashboard... What ended up happening is Airflow still does those analytics workloads, but it also evolved to be used a lot for operational workloads.”
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