How Covestro Turns Airflow Into a Simulation Toolbox with Anja Mackenzie

Building scalable, reproducible workflows for scientific computing often requires bridging the gap between research flexibility and enterprise reliability.

In this episode, Anja MacKenzie, Expert for Cheminformatics at Covestro, explains how her team uses Airflow and Kubernetes to create a shared, self-service platform for computational chemistry.

Key Takeaways:

(00:00) Introduction. (06:19) Custom scripts made sharing and reuse difficult. (09:29) Workflows are manually triggered with user traceability. (10:38) Customization supports varied compute requirements. (12:48) Persistent volumes allow tasks to share large amounts of data. (14:25) Custom operators separate logic from infrastructure. (16:43) Modified triggers connect dependent workflows. (18:36) UI plugins enable file uploads and secure access.

Resources Mentioned:

• Covestro website
• Apache Airflow
• Kubernetes
• Airflow KubernetesPodOperator
• Astronomer
• Airflow Academy by Marc Lamberti
• Airflow Documentation
• Airflow Plugins

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