
What's New in Apache Airflow® 3.3
transcript
show notes
Airflow 3.3 is here, with a set of features to help with the messy realities of production pipelines: persisting state across retries, reacting intelligently to different failure types, and partitioning assets by more than just time. In this episode, Marc Lamberti, Education Content Lead at [Astronomer](astronomer.io), joins Kenten Danas to walk through what's new in the release and where each feature actually pays off.
Key Takeaways:
- 00:00 Introduction.
- 01:46 The new task state store (AIP-103) lets tasks persist state across retries, so a long-running Spark job can be reattached after a worker failure instead of being duplicated on retry.
- 03:46 The asset state store enables watermarking patterns: persist the last processed date or offset to an asset and resume from there on the next run.
- 05:33 Why this matters for agentic workflows: resume an agent from where it left off rather than replaying every action.
- 06:58 Why XComs don't solve this problem: they get reinitialized on every retry.
- 09:27 Pluggable retries let you attach a retry policy to a task that branches on the exception type. Retry on transient errors, stop immediately on a 403.
- 11:42 Subclassing the retry rule for more complex logic, including dynamic retry counts that used to require hacking the metadatabase.
- 15:52 Updates to asset partitions in 3.3: segment-based partitioning with fan-out and roll-up mappers for downstream DAGs.
- 21:42 Running tasks in Java and Go, moving Airflow toward a multi-language orchestrator.
- 23:33 DAG versioning improvement: choose whether a manual rerun uses the most recent DAG version or the original version from that run.
- 25:03 Advice for teams still on Airflow 2: use the upgrade ebook and Astro's AI migration tooling to handle the undifferentiated heavy lifting.
Resources Mentioned:
- Astronomer
- Airflow 3.3 Release Notes
- The Task State Store
- Updates to the asset partitions feature
- Retry policies
- Multi-language support
- 3.3 Webinar
- Upgrading from Airflow 2 to 3 ebook
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