A Musical Interlude: How Orchestras Inspire Modern Data Orchestration

Here in San Francisco recently, classical music fans were disappointed to
learn of the departure of Esa-Pekka Salonen, conductor and music director
of the city’s Symphony orchestra. And all while we’re still mourning the
resignation of his beloved predecessor “MTT” (Michael Tilson-Thomas),
himself the protégé of legendary composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein.
Our friends to the south were
devastated
to hear that Gustavo Dudamel, the “Star Maestro” of the L.A. Philharmonic
would be leaving for the New York Philharmonic, whose own musicians were
“virtually screaming with
excitement”
at the announcement. “Everything comes alive with him,” said one of the
trumpeters.

Celebrated conductors are not a new phenomenon. The New York Philharmonic
became world-famous because of giants like Mahler and Toscanini. Even the
most casual listeners of classical music will probably choose a recording
by Herbert von Karajan or Bernstein over those by a less familiar name.
But ask those same listeners what is it that conductors actually
do
and they might struggle to answer. After all, conductors
generally
don’t make a sound, while a single musician can ruin an entire concert. So
why are they so much better known than the musicians? When a conductor
like Marin Alsop raises her baton, what is the power that she wields?

Beyond the Baton: Conductors Bring the Magic

The most obvious responsibility of a conductor is to keep time, and a
perfect sense of tempo is a special gift. But conducting is also about
anticipation. Most conductors not only stay slightly ahead of the
beat,
but try to give the players a sense of what’s coming next.

Conductors also control the volume, the dynamics. A “forte” marking is
somewhat subjective, and ultimately the musicians need someone to decide
the right level and balance the different sections. You may notice a
conductor trying to bring more out of the strings, or pushing back against
the brass.

Perhaps most importantly, the conductor must understand the flow of a
musical composition, how everything fits together. A motif may be
repeated, first by the violins, later by the wind section, or a musical
theme may be developed throughout a symphony. No single player can be
responsible for the unfolding of these patterns. It is up to the conductor
to recognize them, and figure out how they are manifested in the narrative
of a piece.

The conductor is also a performer, or perhaps “communicator” is a better
way to describe it. Gustavo Dudamel says that, for conducting, “the magic
ingredient is the ability to convey one’s own deepest thoughts all without
words.” And while the primary job is to communicate with the orchestra,
audiences also gain a deeper understanding of the music from a conductor’s
movements and expressions (especially if that conductor happens to be
Bernstein).

Of course, conductors also select the music that the orchestra will play,
which means that they must have an extensive knowledge of music history,
and they must also stay up-to-date on trends in the music industry and
audience preferences. Outside of the concert hall, primary conductors are
also administrators, hiring musicians, preparing budgets, and controlling
costs.

Beyond the Scheduler: Orchestration Powers Data Products

What has this got to do with Astronomer? As the commercial developer of
the world’s foremost orchestration technology, Airflow, the analogy is
probably obvious. Just as a conductor — the original “orchestrator” — does
much more than keep time, so Airflow is much more than a scheduler that
controls the order and timing of tasks within a single pipeline.

Like a conductor, Airflow understands the flow of data, how a network of
operations comes together to yield a data product. It’s also a
communicator — one of the reasons that Airflow became wildly popular was
its user interface, an easy visual way to understand that graph of
operations and to check the status of data flows.

While Airflow remains largely agnostic about the way data tasks are
“performed,” Astronomer’s platform
Astro
has auto-scaling capabilities that make sure tasks have just the right
level of computing power — more for large-scale AI tasks, less when
waiting on a database query to complete. It’s like a conductor controlling
the dynamics of a symphony, keeping everything in balance.

Astro is a “star maestro” in other ways, going beyond the base
capabilities of Airflow in observability, user interface, cost management,
development, and up-to-date integrations with all of the latest frameworks
and tools. We’re even working on ways that Astro can “stay ahead of the
beat” by providing insights into workflows that are more likely to fail,
or by using AI to predict what operators you’re likely to need.

In the world of data, it’s perhaps the “players” of the orchestra — the
Databricks cluster, the Snowflake database, the SageMaker models, or the
OpenAI LLMs — that get most of the attention. While Airflow is enormously
popular (over 30 million downloads a month), the concept of “data
orchestration” generally doesn’t get the attention it deserves as the
connective tissue of modern data-driven organizations. After all, one
database or API arguably looks very much like another from the outside,
but an orchestrator is the irreplaceable foundation of production data
pipelines, the conductor of business processes, the thing that makes
“everything come alive.”

At Astronomer, we’ve seen orchestration become central not only to data
engineering but to MLOps, AI, and app development. In our new
whitepaper,
you can read about the evolution of orchestration, the required
capabilities needed for any modern orchestration technology, and the
benefits data and platform engineering teams can expect. To delve deeper into best practices for optimizing your Airflow environment, we recommend checking out our article on 10 Best Practices for Modern Data Orchestration with Airflow.