Hi Prefect Team, we are evaluating a few workflow ...
# ask-community
p
Hi Prefect Team, we are evaluating a few workflow solutions at my workplace and have a few questions on perfect that I think might get answered on this slack channel. 1. Do you guys have an estimate of the level of effort needed for some current airflow users to migrate to prefect? If you have specific real world examples, it would be great. 2. I have read Prefect is pretty fast and real-time. Do you have some metrics around it for comparison or to look at the numbers? I believe we will have information on what kind of workflows were used to derive these metrics. 3. How do prefect core users handle state management (specifically storing / managing dag state) today? Are there any examples for us to look at? 4. We tried searching for but did not come across any video tutorials of Prefect. My team is fond of video tutorials:) so checking if there are any available on the internet already that I might have not looked at. Please share any links that might address the above questions. Thank you so much!
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k
Hey Priya, It’s great you’re considering Prefect for your workflow solution, welcome! I’ll try to answer your questions as best I can: 1. Although we don’t recommend migrating production level DAGs to Prefect as a POC, we’ve consistently heard that Airflow PoCs can take weeks while Prefect PoCs take days! I’d recommend reading the following articles to get a feel for how they compare: https://medium.com/the-prefect-blog/why-not-airflow-4cfa423299c4 https://docs.prefect.io/core/advanced_tutorials/task-guide.html 2. The Prefect Scheduler does not schedule individual tasks only flows, therefore the speed at which tasks can execute depends on the executor you use. For example, if you run your Flow on Dask, you can expect millisecond latency in between your task runs. In another aspect, the Prefect UI is essentially live updating. 3. Core users who require state management historically used Cloud, but as of this week they can leverage our newly open sourced backend! Another option we’ve seen is a completely custom solution using state handlers. Check out the documentation on state handlers here: https://docs.prefect.io/core/concepts/states.html#state-types 4. On our YT channel you’ll find some recently posted videos including a tour of our Cloud UI, a demo of our recently released Open Source UI, and a livestream recording that took place today! Much more content will be posted in the coming weeks in lieu of the conference talks we had planned. The channel can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMPaCpAiSuLZ0yPyUo0O9rw/featured (edited) I hope this helps, happy building!
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we’ve consistently heard that Airflow PoCs can take weeks while Prefect PoCs take days
This was exactly what happed in our case. I basically gave up on Airflow after a week of hitting my head against multiple walls. …but I completed a production-level Prefect flow in < 1 week.
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p
Awesome, thank you so much for the detailed explanation @Kyle Moon-Wright! I’ll check out the links shared. And thank you @Manuel Aristarán for sharing your experience, very helpful!