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To maximize the power of Airflow, your dags need to be able access data and services that exist outside of Astro. A network connection is the basic requirement for accessing external resources from Astro. After establishing a network connection, you can configure an Airflow connection to access specific resources that are available through the connection.

Network connection recommendations

If you’re just starting out on Astro and you’re working with publicly available services and testing data, you only need a public connection. For example, if you’re accessing a publicly available API, you only need to configure an HTTP Airflow connection to establish a connection between your Deployment and the API. To interact with data on your company’s cloud or at an on-premises location, Astronomer strongly recommends establishing a private network connection. Any networking customizations in Astro are available only for dedicated clusters. For your convenience, we support multiple options for how Astro can privately connect to your resources. Available options are organized based on the cloud provider where Astro is deployed: Once network connectivity is sorted out, follow the steps in Authorize your Deployment to cloud resources for each Deployment that needs access to your resources.
Astronomer monitors the health of Deployments and dags, but it doesn’t monitor the status of network connections because they exist outside of Astronomer’s observable control plane and data plane.