Re:Ask HN: What is the simplest data orchestration tool you'...
by vector_spaces on Friday March 21, 2025 @04:17PM
(#43440347)
Is there anything even more lightweight, where you don't have to write your code any differently? For instance, say I have 10 jobs that don't depend on each other, all of them pretty small.
Dagster and even Luigi feel like overkill but I'd still like to plug those into a unified interface where I can view previous runs, mainly logs and exit codes. Being able to do some light job configuration or add retries would be nice but not required. For the moment I just use a logging handler that writes to a database table and that's fine
Re:Ask HN: What is the simplest data orchestration tool you'...
by cicdw on Friday March 21, 2025 @05:18PM
(#43440917)
One of the goals of Prefect's SDK is to be minimally invasive from a code-standpoint (in the simplest case you only need two lines to convert a script to a `flow`). Our deployment model also makes infrastructure job config a first-class citizen so you might have a good time trying it out. (disclosure: work at Prefect)
Re:Ask HN: What is the simplest data orchestration tool you'...
by aradox66 on Friday March 21, 2025 @08:51PM
(#43442305)
Love prefect! but for workflows involving concurrency, Prefect code needs to get somewhat invasive.
Prefect relies on prefect.task()-wrapped methods as the lowest granularity of concurrency in a program, and requires you to use the (somewhat immature) prefect task APIs to implement that concurrency.
more on this complaint here: https://austinweisgrau.github.io/migrating-to-prefect-part-3...
Re:Ask HN: What is the simplest data orchestration tool you'...
by cicdw on Friday March 21, 2025 @09:57PM
(#43442599)
This is an excellent write up thank you for sharing! Yea, our concurrency API needs an upgrade - coincidentally this is going to be a theme of the next sprint or two so I hope I can report some improvements back soon.
Re:Ask HN: What is the simplest data orchestration tool you'...
by disgruntledphd2 on Friday March 21, 2025 @04:21PM
(#43440383)
I think that Airflow 2 implemented a decorator mode which you can just use on functions.
Honestly, just use airflow, it has its issues but it sucks in well known and predictable ways.
* Luigi -- extensive usage (4y+)
* Makefiles -- (15y+)
* GitHub Actions -- (4y+)
* Airflow -- little usage (<6 months)
* Dagster -- very little, just trying it out
* Prefect -- just followed tutorial
Although it lacks a lot of the monitoring and advanced web ui other platforms have (maybe because of it), Luigi is the simplest to reason about IMHO.
For a new project that will require complex orchestrations, I'd probably go with Dagster or Prefect nowadays. Dagster seems more complex and more powerful with its data lineage functionality, but I have very little experience with either tool.
If it's a simple project, a mix of Makefiles + GH Actions can work well.