join Astronomer at Big Data LDN 2026

When a dashboard breaks, someone files a ticket. When a regulatory reporting deadline is missed, someone calls the regulator. When the AI models behind a travel site go stale, someone books somewhere else.

Steven Hillion from Astronomer looks at the pipelines companies genuinely cannot run without, what it takes to keep them up, and how to avoid the silent failures that are quietly leaking revenue.

Steven will share two real-world examples of data teams using Airflow and Snowflake. Arch Insurance orchestrates pipelines underpinning their regulatory and actuarial reporting. Booking.com trains and serves the models behind billions of searches a year and the trip-planning assistants customers interact with directly. In both cases, pipeline failures can be costly: one ends in a fine, the other in lost revenue.

Building and maintaining resilient, mission-critical pipelines like these require both a proactive approach to reliability and scalability to avoid failures and robust observability, SLAs, and swift, automated recovery when something inevitably breaks.