Here in San Francisco recently, classical music fans were disappointed to learn of the departure of Esa-Pekka Salonen, conductor and music director of the city’s Symphony orchestra. And all while we’re still mourning the resignation of his beloved predecessor “MTT” (Michael Tilson-Thomas), himself the protégé of legendary composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein. Our friends to the south were devastated to hear that Gustavo Dudamel, the “Star Maestro” of the L.A. Philharmonic would be leaving for the New York Philharmonic, whose own musicians were “virtually screaming with excitement” at the announcement. “Everything comes alive with him,” said one of the trumpeters.
Celebrated conductors are not a new phenomenon. The New York Philharmonic became world-famous because of giants like Mahler and Toscanini. Even the most casual listeners of classical music will probably choose a recording by Herbert von Karajan or Bernstein over those by a less familiar name. But ask those same listeners what is it that conductors actually do and they might struggle to answer. After all, conductors generally don’t make a sound, while a single musician can ruin an entire concert. So why are they so much better known than the musicians? When a conductor like Marin Alsop raises her baton, what is the power that she wields?
Beyond the Baton: Conductors Bring the Magic
The most obvious responsibility of a conductor is to keep time, and a perfect sense of tempo is a special gift. But conducting is also about anticipation. Most conductors not only stay slightly ahead of the beat, but try to give the players a sense of what’s coming next.
Conductors also control the volume, the dynamics. A “forte” marking is somewhat subjective, and ultimately the musicians need someone to decide the right level and balance the different sections. You may notice a conductor trying to bring more out of the strings, or pushing back against the brass.
Perhaps most importantly, the conductor must understand the flow of a musical composition, how everything fits together. A motif may be repeated, first by the violins, later by the wind section, or a musical theme may be developed throughout a symphony. No single player can be responsible for the unfolding of these patterns. It is up to the conductor to recognize them, and figure out how they are manifested in the narrative of a piece.
The conductor is also a performer, or perhaps “communicator” is a better way to describe it. Gustavo Dudamel says that, for conducting, “the magic ingredient is the ability to convey one's own deepest thoughts all without words.” And while the primary job is to communicate with the orchestra, audiences also gain a deeper understanding of the music from a conductor’s movements and expressions (especially if that conductor happens to be Bernstein).
Of course, conductors also select the music that the orchestra will play, which means that they must have an extensive knowledge of music history, and they must also stay up-to-date on trends in the music industry and audience preferences. Outside of the concert hall, primary conductors are also administrators, hiring musicians, preparing budgets, and controlling costs.
Beyond the Scheduler: Orchestration Powers Data Products
What has this got to do with Astronomer? As the commercial developer of the world’s foremost orchestration technology, Airflow, the analogy is probably obvious. Just as a conductor — the original “orchestrator” — does much more than keep time, so Airflow is much more than a scheduler that controls the order and timing of tasks within a single pipeline.
Like a conductor, Airflow understands the flow of data, how a network of operations comes together to yield a data product. It’s also a communicator — one of the reasons that Airflow became wildly popular was its user interface, an easy visual way to understand that graph of operations and to check the status of data flows.
While Airflow remains largely agnostic about the way data tasks are “performed,” Astronomer’s platform Astro has auto-scaling capabilities that make sure tasks have just the right level of computing power — more for large-scale AI tasks, less when waiting on a database query to complete. It’s like a conductor controlling the dynamics of a symphony, keeping everything in balance.
Astro is a “star maestro” in other ways, going beyond the base capabilities of Airflow in observability, user interface, cost management, development, and up-to-date integrations with all of the latest frameworks and tools. We’re even working on ways that Astro can “stay ahead of the beat” by providing insights into workflows that are more likely to fail, or by using AI to predict what operators you’re likely to need.
In the world of data, it’s perhaps the “players” of the orchestra — the Databricks cluster, the Snowflake database, the SageMaker models, or the OpenAI LLMs — that get most of the attention. While Airflow is enormously popular (over 30 million downloads a month), the concept of “data orchestration” generally doesn’t get the attention it deserves as the connective tissue of modern data-driven organizations. After all, one database or API arguably looks very much like another from the outside, but an orchestrator is the irreplaceable foundation of production data pipelines, the conductor of business processes, the thing that makes “everything come alive.”
At Astronomer, we’ve seen orchestration become central not only to data engineering but to MLOps, AI, and app development. In our new whitepaper, you can read about the evolution of orchestration, the required capabilities needed for any modern orchestration technology, and the benefits data and platform engineering teams can expect. To delve deeper into best practices for optimizing your Airflow environment, we recommend checking out our article on 10 Best Practices for Modern Data Orchestration with Airflow.
