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Astronomer with IBM: A seamless and secure way to orchestrate AI/ML pipelines with Airflow

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Author

Muhammad Mohsin

Product Manager, Data Observability by Databand, Astronomer with IBM

Astronomer with IBM fuses Astronomer’s market-leading, managed Apache Airflow with IBM’s data and AI portfolio, giving enterprises a secure, hybrid-cloud control plane that scales as boldly as their ambitions.

In this episode of the Data Flowcast by Astronomer, IBM Senior Product Manager, BJ Adesoji and GTM PM and Growth Leader, Ryan Yackel, join to discuss multiple topics. These topics include how IBM customers are using Airflow in production, the challenges they face at scale and what the new IBM plus Astronomer collaboration unlocks.

Airflow in action

Airflow already runs quietly behind many IBM customers’ most critical workloads. The State of Airflow 2025 report shows that 35% of enterprises orchestrate AI/ML pipelines with Airflow. This trend is reflected at The Weather Company, where Airflow powers predictive analytics pipelines that drive advertising decisions. Insurers rely on it, too, from fraud detection to dynamic auto rate reporting that blends city, vehicle history and mileage data.

The pattern is clear: large enterprises with diverse, sometimes legacy, tech stacks use Airflow as the connective tissue binding their data landscape.

The open source ceiling

At scale, OSS Airflow reveals multiple friction points as enterprises try to manage their Airflow instances. Gaps in capabilities that open source cannot address include:

  • Fragmented deployments: Multiple teams upgrade and configure in silos, eroding visibility.
  • Enterprise-grade security gaps: RBAC, SSO, lineage, audit trails and painless rollbacks all demand heavy lifting.

The more data engineering teams’ time is consumed here, the less time they’re spending on innovations for their teams and business.

A new path forward

The joint Astronomer-IBM offering attacks those pain points on two fronts:

  1. Client experience
    • Native hooks into stalwarts like dbt and IBM watsonx® to deliver a unified orchestration layer.
    • IBM® Databand® overlays deep data observability, turning the stack into a single, end-to-end control plane.
    • These solutions deliver faster time-to-value, hardened reliability and flexible cloud deployment (whether on-prem or hybrid) with IBM support behind every cluster.
  2. Innovation at the edge
    • We’re codeveloping agentic capabilities that allow watsonx Orchestrate® agents to automatically resolve data-quality issues or flag anomalies before they bite.
    • These AI-driven accelerators are going to strip even more manual toil from pipeline creation, management and scale-out.

Experience end-to-end deployment flexibility 

Leveraging Astronomer with IBM, enterprises can retire the hidden costs of self-managed Airflow while keeping full deployment flexibility. Many teams still shoulder that operational burden, but those resources are better invested in building the future. Now there’s a clear off-ramp: enterprise-grade Airflow, fortified by IBM, ready to power the next wave of data-driven innovation.

Download the State of Airflow Report 2025 to learn more about how enterprises use Airflow and contact your IBM representative to learn more about Astronomer with IBM.

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