Los Angeles Meetup: The State of Airflow 2026
Details
Join fellow Airflow enthusiasts and leaders at Blank Spaces Santa Monica for an evening of engaging talks, great food and drinks, and exclusive swag!
We'll start you off with a deep dive into the Airflow 2026 survey results, and finish off with a community member presentation.
PRESENTATIONS
Talk #1: The State of Apache Airflow® 2026
- Speaker: Gunnar Lykins, Sales Engineering Manager at Astronomer
Apache Airflow® continues to thrive as the world’s leading open-source data orchestration platform, with 30M downloads per month and over 3k contributors. 2025 marked a major milestone with the release of Airflow 3, which introduced DAG versioning, enhanced security and task isolation, assets, and more. These changes have reshaped how data teams build, operate, and govern their pipelines.
In this session, our speaker will share insights from the State of Airflow 2026 report, including:
- Latest trends in how teams are using Airflow today
- What’s next for the project and ecosystem
- A discussion of emerging best practices and evolving use cases
Join us to hear directly from a leader in the community and discover how to get the most out of Airflow in the year ahead.
Talk #2: 3,000 Airflow Deployments Later: What We've Learned at OpenMetadata
- Speaker: Nick Acosta, Developer Advocate at OpenMetadata
OpenMetadata is an open-source platform used in over 3,000 Enterprise Deployments for data discoverability, observability, and governance. OpenMetadata uses Airflow to manage metadata ingestion from over 100 different cloud data services, including Snowflake and Databricks, and many organizations use it to monitor their Airflow DAGs as well. In this talk, Nick Acosta, Developer Advocate at OpenMetadata will share best practices he has seen from the OpenMetadata community on how Airflow and OpenMetadata complement each other, and how to use agents to automate governance and orchestrate AI-driven semantic intelligence.
AGENDA
- 5:30-6 PM: Arrivals, networking, food & drinks
- 6-7:05PM: Presentations
- 7:05-8PM: Networking, food & drinks
