State of Airflow 2025: Unleashing the Future of Data Orchestration

Organizations from massive enterprises to up-and-coming start ups are racing to unlock the full potential of their data. Whether it’s powering AI-driven applications, orchestrating complex data pipelines, or enabling business analytics and decision-making, the ability to efficiently move and process data has become a competitive advantage. Data orchestration has never been more critical and Apache Airflow® has firmly established itself as the industry standard for data orchestration, a position reinforced by its remarkable growth and widespread adoption.

We can clearly see 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 boasted more than:

• 31M monthly downloads (less than 900K in 2020)
• 3K+ contributors (around 1.3K in 2020)
• 29K pull requests (about 10K in 2020)
• 77K organizations using Airflow (approximately 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. At Astronomer, we have a front-row seat to the evolution of data orchestration, and we’re excited to release the State of Airflow Report 2025—the most comprehensive look at how teams across industries are leveraging Airflow to drive their businesses forward. The 2025 State of Airflow Report, captures insights from over 5,000 data professionals (the largest survey of data engineers to date) and is combined with anonymized telemetry gathered from Astronomer’s customers to learn exactly how these professionals are using Airflow within their organizations.

The findings confirm what we see every day: Airflow is more than just a workflow orchestrator; it’s a mission-critical component of the modern data stack. DataOps is more complex than ever, but leading enterprises are cutting through the noise by unifying around orchestration as the foundation. The report makes a compelling case for why a consolidated DataOps stack should begin with orchestration, specifically with Apache Airflow®.

Here’s a sneak peek at some of the key findings—but to get the full picture, be sure to download the complete report.

Airflow Is Business-Critical

Apache Airflow isn’t just popular—it’s indispensable. More than 90% of surveyed engineers recommend Airflow, making it a foundational tool in modern data ecosystems.

For large organizations, its role is even more critical. Among enterprises with 50,000+ employees, 53.8% report using Airflow for their most mission-critical workloads. As businesses scale and new AI solutions and data products demand increasingly accurate and extensive data, their reliance on Airflow grows, solidifying its status as the backbone of their data operations.

Enterprise Adoption is Scaling Rapidly

Enterprise Airflow usage is expanding at an unprecedented pace. As organizations scale, they’re running more production instances and handling higher data volumes. Among large enterprises, more than 20% report running 20 or more production Airflow instances, far outpacing mid-sized and smaller businesses.

We also see a shift beyond traditional use cases. Companies are pushing Airflow beyond delivering data for internal dashboards, using it to power AI-driven applications, compliance workflows, and even high-volume customer-facing services.

At Astronomer, we’ve seen this firsthand as our Astro customers increased their compute usage by 97.3% over the past year, while more than doubling their average monthly successful task count. This rapid expansion underscores Airflow’s growing impact on business-critical operations.

Orchestrating Revenue-Generating Solutions, Not Just Internal Data Pipelines

Traditionally, orchestration has been associated with internal analytics and operational efficiency. But that’s changing—fast. The State of Airflow Report 2025 shows that data orchestration is not just about internal dashboards or operational efficiency, it is driving direct business impact. Over 85% of surveyed users expect an increase in external-facing or revenue-generating solutions built on Airflow in the next year. This includes orchestrating AI-powered products, automating customer experiences, and enabling decision-making for high-impact business processes.

Airflow is not simply about moving data; it’s about driving business growth and innovation.

Orchestration-first organizations deliver AI while others stagnate

As AI adoption accelerates, orchestration is becoming the foundation for success. Companies are turning to Airflow to orchestrate complex AI and machine learning (ML) pipelines. The data confirms this trend: 21.4% of Airflow users already use it for MLOps (machine learning operations) while 8.2% are adopting it for GenAI (generative AI) use cases, a number expected to surge in the coming year. Among Airflow experts with 5+ years of experience, over 30% are running ML workloads, and 13.3% are leveraging Airflow for GenAI.

This growing reliance on Airflow for AI isn’t surprising. AI applications require large-scale data processing, model training, and inference pipelines, all of which need robust orchestration. As AI continues to evolve, Airflow is becoming the go-to orchestration layer for productionizing AI at scale. The impact of proper tooling and support is even more striking when you consider organizations using Astronomer's Astro. Among Astro customers, 55% are leveraging Airflow for ML and AI workloads—a number that jumps to 69% for those who have been using Astro for two years or more, showing significantly higher AI adoption rates.

Flexibility is Driving Adoption in a Multi-Cloud World

Organizations refuse to be locked into a single data platform or vendor. The report shows that enterprises are embracing multi-cloud and multi-platform data strategies, with Airflow serving as the flexible orchestration layer that ties everything together.

When it comes to cloud data platforms, Snowflake, Databricks and BigQuery are competing with each other for usage and market dominance. Instead of committing to just one provider, enterprises are building diverse, adaptable data stacks—and they’re relying on Airflow to seamlessly orchestrate data across these environments.

The survey also found that 64.4% of large enterprise Airflow users rely on Python, Bash, and Kubernetes operators, emphasizing the need for customizability and flexibility. Businesses need agility over how they move and process their data to be able to adapt to changing trends and leverage the newest data and AI tooling.

Looking Ahead: Airflow 3.0 is Coming

The future of Airflow is brighter than ever, and the upcoming release of Airflow 3.0 in April 2025 is set to bring major advancements. With features like DAG versioning, a modernized UI, Remote Execution, and advanced Event-driven scheduling, Airflow 3.0 is set to further empower data teams to innovate faster and more securely.

These features are designed to make Airflow more secure, intuitive, and responsive to data needs—ensuring that your data pipelines are not only robust but also primed for the future.

Get the Full Report: The Future of Airflow Awaits

The State of Airflow Report 2025 is packed with even more insights, real-world examples, and in-depth analysis on how Airflow is shaping the future of data orchestration.

If you want to stay ahead of the curve and see how industry leaders are scaling Airflow to drive AI, automation, and business transformation, this is a must-read. You can download the complete report and join Astronomer's webinar later today for a detailed discussion of these trends.

The 2025 State of Airflow Report makes one thing clear: data orchestration is now a strategic imperative that's powering the next generation of data-driven innovations. As organizations continue to build more sophisticated data products and AI solutions, the role of robust orchestration will only grow in importance.

At Astronomer, we are committed to empowering data teams with the best tools, knowledge, and infrastructure to operationalize data at scale. If you’re ready to unlock the full potential of Airflow, let’s talk.