Astro vs. Amazon MWAA

Airflow without the ops burden of MWAA.

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Trusted by 900+ engineering teams

WHY ASTRO?

The same Airflow. None of the hand-holding..

Built to run Apache Airflow reliably at scale, out of the box, without the manual worker sizing and fine-tuning MWAA still requires.

Pay for what runs, not what's provisioned

Workers scale down automatically when there's no task to run; non-prod environments can also be scheduled to pause overnight or on weekends.
Ship changes in seconds, not hours

Most fixes ship in under a minute, without a rebuild or any interruption to pipelines already running.
See why a pipeline failed, not just that it failed

Go from alert to traced root cause and suggested fix in minutes, with built-in AI assistance and full lineage visibility.
Scale to more teams without scaling the effort

Each new team gets an isolated environment, with its own code, data, and compute, and no new infrastructure to build.

COMPARE YOUR OPTIONS

Astro vs. Amazon MWAA

Astro

Amazon MWAA

Build faster & better

Local development

Astro CLI or in-browser Astro IDE to build, test, and debug pipelines before they go live — no messy local Docker setup

MWAA Local Runner, a separate local emulator that often behaves differently than the real, hosted environment

AI-powered Dag authoring

Otto drafts and explains Dags using your actual code and repo — not generic suggestions

Generic tools like Amazon Q or Kiro, which aren't built for Airflow and don't know your Dags

CI/CD & deployment

Git-based deploys via the Astro CLI, API, or Terraform — ship through your normal PR review process

Manual file uploads to an S3 bucket, with no built-in review or rollback

Access to latest Airflow

Guaranteed access to every new Airflow release; Astro is the first managed service to support each one

Historically weeks behind the community release, and has skipped entire versions (Airflow 3.1 was never supported)

Run with confidence & efficiency

Multitenancy

Isolated environments per team, with separate code, data, and compute, so one team's mistake can't touch another's

One shared environment for everyone; running teams safely side by side usually means a separate MWAA environment, with its own bill, for each team

Scaling & worker sizing

Astro reads Airflow's own task and worker state to scale automatically and heal stuck workers, down to zero when idle

Six fixed environment sizes, billed hourly whether they're busy or idle, with no equivalent self-healing

Task execution

The Astro Executor runs tasks directly, with no message broker in the loop, so a restart, deploy, or autoscaling event can't orphan a running task; Celery and Kubernetes executors are also available if you need them

Runs on Celery with a message broker, which has caused documented autoscaling and task-orphaning issues

Support

24/7 support from the engineers who build Apache Airflow

AWS supports the infrastructure only — no Airflow expertise, and no SLA for Airflow itself

Upgrades

One-click upgrades with a local test step first, and rollback to any deploy from the last 90 days; Otto can also help plan and validate the upgrade itself

Applied in-place on your live environment, with no rollback support and no in-place path from Airflow 2.x to 3.x

Security patching

Fixes are backported to every supported version, so a CVE means a patch, not a forced upgrade

Deprecated versions lose support on a fixed timeline, pushing you toward a migration

Remote/hybrid execution

Remote Execution Agents keep workloads on-prem or in another cloud while Astro handles orchestration

Runs inside a single AWS VPC, with no option to orchestrate workloads running elsewhere

Disaster recovery

Built-in cross-region failover keeps pipelines running through a regional outage

No native cross-region DR — you'd need to build and maintain that yourself

Observe & optimize

Pipeline observability

Real-time lineage and SLA monitoring show you why a pipeline failed and what's impacted, not just that it failed

CloudWatch logs only — infrastructure detail, with no pipeline or SLA context

AI-assisted investigations

Otto traces a failure to root cause and suggests a fix, in minutes

No AI investigation support — troubleshooting is manual

CUSTOMER STORIES

Data & AI Teams trust Astro

"We had a very high reliance on Airflow. It was super valuable. But the setup had grown organically as the company scaled: nine environments, no shared patterns, and MWAA couldn't keep up with where we were heading. We needed something that could actually scale with us."

Jordan Kail Data Engineer

60x

faster CI/CD deploys

20x

faster pipeline development

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"MWAA provided a solid starting point for us, but as we evolved, we needed more tailored configurations and isolated environments to manage our growing data operations effectively… Astro emerged as a better fit for our long-term goals…"

John Marriott Manager, Data Platform Team

Job runtime cut from 2 hours to 2–3 minutes · migrated in a 2-week sprint

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"Bringing our first in-house agentic AI solutions to market is an exciting milestone and, together with our latest AI innovations, we're making strides on delivering new levels of personalization and a faster, more seamless platform."

James Waters Chief Business Officer

1,000s

DAGs running in production

1,000s

data practitioners building on Astro

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See Astro in action.

Discuss your MWAA migration with the Airflow experts and find out what fully-managed Airflow on Astro can do for your team.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Do we have to migrate everything at once?

No. Astro runs the same open-source Apache Airflow as MWAA, so most teams move workloads over incrementally, environment by environment.

Will our Dags need to be rewritten?

In most cases, no — Dag code is largely portable between the two. Migration work is typically in connections, secrets, and IAM/networking config; AWS-specific hooks or custom plugins should be reviewed.

How does Astro's pricing compare to MWAA?

Astro is usage-based with workers that scale to zero when idle. MWAA bills each environment hourly at its class rate regardless of load. Interested in a tailored comparison? Talk to us.

Will our Astro spend count toward our AWS commitment?

Yes. Astro is available on the AWS Marketplace, so it's billed through your existing AWS account and counts toward your committed spend, with no separate procurement process needed.