Scalable Data Ingestion Architecture Using Airflow and Spark

This is an experience report on implementing and moving to a scalable data ingestion architecture. The requirements were to process tens of terabytes of data coming from several sources with data refresh cadences varying from daily to annual. The main challenge is that each provider has their own quirks in schemas and delivery processes. To achieve this we use Apache Airflow to organize the workflows and to schedule their execution, including developing custom Airflow hooks and operators to handle similar tasks in different pipelines. We are running on AWS using Apache Spark to horizontally scale the data processing and Kubernetes for container management.

We will explain the reasons for this architecture, and we will also share the pros and cons we have observed when working with these technologies. Furthermore, we will explain how this approach has simplified the process of bringing in new data sources and considerably reduced the maintenance and operation overhead, but also the challenges that we have had during this transition.