Summary

In this chapter, we introduced the basics of DAGs, tasks, operators, Xcoms, task groups, triggers, and the airflowctl CLI. We covered interacting with the Airflow console and reviewing the basics of DAG authoring, with a typical example included in the initial locally run version of Airflow.

Each of these topics is critical to understand and master before attempting to create large ETL pipelines or other ML/AI use cases with Airflow. It is recommended that you spend time reviewing the basic DAG example and practice the different triggers or operators identified in this chapter, ensuring that you feel comfortable building larger-scale systems as you grow as an engineer.

In the next few chapters, we will expand on this initial basic DAG example with a real ETL pipeline and perform our first data extraction.