Amsterdam Apache Airflow® Meetup at Booking.com!

Join fellow Apache Airflow enthusiasts at Booking.com's Offices for an evening of engaging presentations, great conversation, delicious food, drinks, and of course, swag!

The evening will consist of three presentations followed by networking. We can't wait to see you there!

PRESENTATIONS

Presentation #1: Deepdive into event-driven scheduling with Airflow 3

• Speaker: Bas Harenslak, Staff Architect at Astronomer

Historically Airflow was only capable of time-based scheduling, where a DAG would run at certain times. For data updates at varying times, such as an external party delivering data to an S3 bucket, that meant having to run a DAG and continuously poll for updates. Airflow 3 introduces event-driven scheduling that enables you to trigger DAGs based on such updates. In this talk I'll demonstrate how this changes your DAG's code and how this works internally in Airflow. Lastly, I'll demonstrate a practical use case that leverages Airflow 3's event-driven scheduling.

Presentation #2: How booking workflows use data asset to track data evolution

• Speaker: Anirban Saha, Technical Product Manager at Booking.com

Traditionally, managing the lifecycle of data in workflows at Booking involved ad hoc tracking and custom logic to handle data changes. With the adoption of data assets, we now have a standardized way to represent, version, and evolve data over time. In this talk, I’ll introduce how data assets are implemented at Booking, how versioning is handled under the hood, and how our workflows are built to consume and respond to these evolving assets. I’ll close with a real-world example that shows how data assets help us ensure consistency and traceability in a complex production workflow.

Presentation #3: Building multi-tenant Airflow at scale: From Chaos to Control

• Speaker: Omid Karami, Software Engineer at Booking.com

Running Airflow at scale for thousands of workflows across multiple teams introduces challenges around standardization, governance, and isolation. At Booking, we’ve built a multi-tenant Airflow platform that serves over 4,000 workflows using a custom DSL defined in workflow.yaml files. In this talk, I’ll show how we use automated DAG generation to bring structure to complexity, how we achieved horizontal scalability by decoupling orchestration from execution, and how reusable step templates help us enforce governance—without sacrificing workflow isolation. You'll leave with a blueprint for taming Airflow at scale.

Presentation #4: Building Lineage Observability at Scale

• Speaker: Jeroen Schmidt, Senior Data Engineer at Booking.com

Observability in data workflows often stops at logs and metrics, leaving data lineage as a blind spot. At Booking, we set out to change that by treating lineage as a core observability layer. In this talk, I’ll walk through how we integrated lineage tracking into our Airflow ecosystem, what metadata we capture, and how we surface it to users in a meaningful way. I’ll also share how lineage data helps us debug failures, detect unexpected changes, and ensure compliance. You’ll leave with a practical view of what it takes to make lineage not just visible, but actionable.

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AGENDA

• 14:00-14:30: Arrivals, Registration & Swag
• 14:30-15:00: Presentation 1
• 15:00-15:30: Presentation 2
• 15:30-16:00: Break & Snacks
• 16:00-16:30: Presentation 3
• 16:30-17:00: Presentation 4
• 17:00-19:00: Drinks, Food, & Networking