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Cloud · GCP

Cloud Composer

Easycloud-10
gcpcomposerairfloworchestration

Question

What is Cloud Composer?

Solution

Cloud Composer is Google's managed Apache Airflow service. Google runs the Airflow control plane (webserver, scheduler, metadata DB) on GKE under the hood; you write DAGs and deploy them.

Problem first. You still need orchestration: "wait for GCS file → run Dataflow → run dbt in BigQuery → notify Slack." Airflow is the standard DAG tool; Composer removes most of the cluster babysitting.

Composer (managed Airflow)
   DAG: daily_sales
     1. GCSSensor
     2. DataflowStartFlexTemplateOperator
     3. BigQueryInsertJobOperator
     4. Email / Pub/Sub notify

Why DE teams use it

  • Native GCP operators (BigQuery, Dataflow, GCS, Dataproc)
  • IAM + VPC integration with the rest of GCP
  • Less DIY Airflow ops than self-hosting

Trade-offs

  • Cost of a managed environment (even when idle-ish)
  • Version upgrades / environment sizing still need attention
  • Same Airflow concepts: DAGs, tasks, retries, sensors, XCom

Interview tip: "Composer = managed Airflow on GCP." Map one DAG step to BigQuery/Dataflow so it sounds concrete.

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