Apache Airflow® is a platform created by the community to programmatically author, schedule, and monitor workflows.

It is based on several key principles:

* Scalable: Apache Airflow® has a modular architecture and uses a message queue to orchestrate an arbitrary number of workers. Airflow™ is ready to scale to infinity.

* Dynamic: Apache Airflow® pipelines are defined in Python, allowing for dynamic pipeline generation. This allows for writing code that instantiates pipelines dynamically.

* Extensible: It is easy to define your own operators and extend libraries to fit the level of abstraction that suits your environment.

* Elegant: Apache Airflow® pipelines are lean and explicit. Parametrization is built into its core using the powerful Jinja templating engine.

Regarding its main features:

* Pure Python: You can use standard Python features to create your workflows, including date time formats for scheduling and loops to dynamically generate tasks. This allows you to maintain full flexibility when building your workflows. There is no need for command-line or XML black-magic.

* Useful UI: Apache Airflow® provides a robust and modern web application to monitor, schedule, and manage your workflows. You always have full insight into the status and logs of completed and ongoing tasks. There is no need to learn old, cron-like interfaces.

* Robust Integrations: The platform provides many plug-and-play operators that are ready to execute your tasks on various major cloud platforms like Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and many other third-party services. This makes Airflow easy to apply to current infrastructure and extend to next-gen technologies. Examples of integrations include Airbyte, Alibaba Cloud OSS, Amazon Athena, Amazon CloudFormation, Amazon CloudWatch Logs, Amazon DataSync, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon EC2, and more.

* Easy to Use: Anyone with Python knowledge can deploy a workflow with Apache Airflow®. The scope of your pipelines is not limited; you can use it to build ML models, transfer data, manage your infrastructure, and more.

* Open Source: As an open source project, wherever you want to share your improvement, you can do this by opening a Pull Request. It’s simple as that, with no barriers or prolonged procedures. Airflow has many active users who willingly share their experiences. A Slack is available if you have questions.