Amazon SageMaker vs. Apache Airflow

Amazon Sagemaker suits well in areas of data science and Machine learnings where medium to high-volume data is to be used for analysis. For a lean and platform agnostic deployment, it provides kubernetes integration to containerize the solution and deploy on any platform. It is one of the best solution for technical users for training Machine Learning models.

Incentivized

For a quick job scanning of status and deep-diving into job issues, details, and flows, AirFlow does a good job. No fuss, no muss. The low learning curve as the UI is very straightforward, and navigating it will be familiar after spending some time using it. Our requirements are pretty simple. Job scheduler, workflows, and monitoring. The jobs we run are >100, but still is a lot to review and troubleshoot when jobs don't run. So when managing large jobs, AirFlow dated UI can be a bit of a drawback.

Incentivized

• SageMaker is useful as a managed Jupyter notebook server. Using the notebook instances' IAM roles to grant access to private S3 buckets and other AWS resources is great. Using SageMaker's lifecycle scripts and AWS Secrets Manager to inject connection strings and other secrets is great.
• SageMaker is good at serving models. The interface it provides is often clunky, but a managed, auto-scaling model server is powerful.
• SageMaker is opinionated about versioning machine learning models and useful if you agree with its opinions.

Incentivized

• Apache Airflow is one of the best Orchestration platforms and a go-to scheduler for teams building a data platform or pipelines.
• Apache Airflow supports multiple operators, such as the Databricks, Spark, and Python operators. All of these provide us with functionality to implement any business logic.
• Apache Airflow is highly scalable, and we can run a large number of DAGs with ease. It provided HA and replication for workers. Maintaining airflow deployments is very easy, even for smaller teams, and we also get lots of metrics for observability.

Incentivized

• Searching and descriptions can be easier to read and interpret.
• Training modules and customer service training representative could make on boarding employees easier.

Incentivized

• A local "dry run" or IDE plugin that can validate and simulate DAG execution without needing a full environment.
• Better feedback on DAG parse errors in the UI or CLI.
• Navigating large DAGs with hundreds of tasks can be slow and hard to understand visually.

Incentivized

For its capability to connect with multicloud environments. Access Control management is something that we don't get in all the schedulers and orchestrators. But although it provides so many flexibility and options to due to python , some level of knowledge of python is needed to be able to build workflows.

Incentivized

We have not invested in another machine learning software at this time and so far this has proved very successful with our machine learning teams. As mentioned, I am training these individuals simply on the fundamentals of the software and using it/customizing it for their needs. It has been very easy to do this and has gotten great reviews across the organization so far.

Incentivized

Apache Airflow is suited for a much wider set of use cases compared to Databricks. You can run it anywhere, and there is also no vendor lock-in. With Airflow, we can utilize almost any compute engine. Same thing we want to do with Databricks. There might be some level of difficulty based on the support.

Incentivized

• Using SageMaker, we can truly implement 'fail early, learn fast,' using an on-demand server for training.
• It also saves your money from investing in a physical server for very rare use.
• However, the pricing is high, but it will cost you only for what you use.

Incentivized

• Most of the ETL processes were automated, cutting down on human labor.
• Apache Airflow's user interface (UI) was very informative and straightforward.
• Since ETL processes were providing data via airflow, we were able to gain a deeper comprehension of the data at hand.

Incentivized