Stumbled upon prefect while debugging a few jenkins issues, and it appears to be a great tool that could replace a lot of what i'm doing in jenkins (and was hoping to migrate to airflow). The only drawback I can see, having poked around for an hour, is the lack of UI in the opensource version. While I'd love to use the cloud, the size of my workloads and sensitivity of data makes running in prefectcloud a problem. Just wanted to give some feedback, as i've seen others ask the same question.

Hi Matt! While we don’t open source the UI code itself, we do offer a 100% free version that you can access which is bundled up with “Prefect Scheduler”. If you DM me your email address I can grant you access. On the workload and data front, note that Prefect Cloud was designed in a unique way to not require access to your infrastructure. I.e., you are in full control of your execution environment, including your code and data, and neither are ever provided to Prefect Cloud. Read more on this here: https://docs.prefect.io/cloud/dataflow.html

Hi @matt_innerspace.io, I initially had a similar assumption to you on Prefect Cloud (we work in healthcare with regulated PHI data that can't leave our infrastructure), but they have a really cool hybrid execution model that we now use extensively. We run the Prefect Agent in our infrastructure (AWS VPC) so that Flows execute within our environment and process data within our VPC. The Agent calls out to Cloud to update Task/Flow status, check if new Flows should be run, etc. but none of our data leaves our environment.

maybe i'm wrong.. i'm happy to dig in to see how it works.

Note that the Welcome Flow tutorial code snippets are for Prefect 0.7.3; we are currently working on new tutorials for the new deployment model (0.8.0+). To run the welcome flow using 0.8.0+, adjust the Agent start command to:

prefect agent start docker -t TOKEN

and you should be good to go

i can see my local agent waiting... but not running, though i can see 2 pending runs in the cloud.

Right, see my above note; the default agent changed between 0.7.3 and 0.8.0 from docker -> local

am i able to set a flow schedule somewhere? i.e. every minute? I can see that it's not set in the example flow, but not sure where to do that.

Yup; schedules are specified in code on the flow. Check out these docs for some examples: https://docs.prefect.io/core/concepts/schedules.html