Kestra
Building basic pipelines with Kestra
Information from DataTalks.Club about Kestra
Kestra Summary
What is Kestra? Kestra is an open-source orchestration platform that unifies workflow management for data pipelines, business processes, and automation. It brings Infrastructure as Code practices to all workflows through declarative YAML (Flow Code) or a No-Code Editor, with an API-first design that enables flexible integration.
Core Value Proposition Kestra separates orchestration logic from business logic, allowing teams to focus on what their code does rather than how it's managed. This modular approach keeps workflows lightweight and scalable while eliminating technical debt from fragmented tools.
Key Features
Accessibility: Serves both developers and non-technical users through multiple interfaces - Flow Code Editor with syntax validation and autocompletion, No-Code Editor, and IDE extensions (VS Code, JetBrains).
Built-in Intelligence: Tasks include automatic orchestration capabilities like conditional branching, retry policies, error handling, concurrency control, and log management without custom code.
Extensive Plugin Ecosystem: Over 900 prebuilt plugins available immediately, plus support for custom scripts in any language (Python, R, Node.js, Rust, Go, SQL, Bash).
Dependency Management: Each task runs in isolated containers or environments, eliminating dependency conflicts.
Version Control: Complete revision history with rollback capabilities and side-by-side comparison.
AI Copilot: Generate workflow YAML from natural language descriptions.
Unique Advantages
API-First: Every UI action can be performed via HTTP calls, enabling CI/CD integration, Terraform management, and custom UI development
Language-Agnostic: Orchestrate existing scripts without rewriting or adding decorators
Scalable: Handles everything from daily jobs on single servers to millions of events in multi-tenant environments
Cloud-Native: Deploy via standalone binary, Docker, or Helm Charts across any cloud provider or on-premises
Clear Visibility: Namespaces, labels, subflows, and event-driven orchestration provide transparency into dependencies
No Vendor Lock-In: Open-source and self-hosted with full data control
Common Use Cases
Data pipelines and ETL/ELT with dbt transformations
Process automation with manual approvals and user-facing apps
Microservice coordination via events and APIs
Generative AI workflows with human validation checkpoints
IT automation for infrastructure provisioning (AWS, GCP, on-prem)
Cross-team collaboration across analytics, finance, marketing, and engineering
Custom application backends
Target Users Industries include retail/supply chain, healthcare/pharmaceuticals, and automotive. Roles span data engineers, software engineers, and platform engineers, with interfaces designed for varying technical comfort levels.
Main concepts
Namespaces
In Kestra, Namespaces are hierarchical organizational units for your workflows, providing logical grouping, isolation, and fine-grained access control for flows, secrets, variables, and reusable code (Namespace Files), acting like folders in a filesystem for better management, especially in large teams, allowing separation for projects like company.team.projectA. They enable teams to share logic (Python, SQL) directly within Kestra without complex Git setups and offer dedicated resource management (storage, secrets).
Flow
Task
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