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Airflow & DAGs · Core Concepts & DAGs

Core components of Airflow architecture

Easyairflow-03
architectureschedulerexecutormetadata

Question

What are the core components of Airflow architecture?

Solution

              Airflow                                   |                          ┌──────────┼──────────┐               ↓          ↓          ↓           Scheduler   Webserver   Metadata DB       |                                  Executor                                 |                                  Workers                           

Scheduler

Decides which task should run and when.

Webserver

Provides the Airflow UI: view DAGs, task status, logs, retries, dependencies.

Metadata Database

Stores DAG runs, task instances, states, connections, variables, XCom metadata. Production usually uses PostgreSQL or MySQL/MariaDB. SQLite is mainly for local learning.

Executor

Determines how tasks execute (Sequential, Local, Celery, Kubernetes, …).

Worker

Actually runs tasks in distributed setups (for example Celery workers).

Interview tip: Scheduler decides; workers execute; metadata DB remembers; UI shows what happened.

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