Data Orchestration: Build vs. Buy?

Organizations face a critical decision when deploying Apache Airflow for data orchestration: build and maintain their own infrastructure, leverage general purpose hyperscaler managed services, or adopt a purpose-built platform. This analysis examines where engineering time gets invested, what hidden costs accumulate, and where each approach delivers, or fails to deliver, value.

In this whitepaper, you’ll learn:

• How to calculate the true engineering cost of maintaining and scaling self-managed Airflow infrastructure
• How to evaluate potential constraints hyperscaler managed services may introduce, from cloud lock-in to always-on costs
• Indicators that self-managed Airflow still makes sense for your team (and what to look out for if it doesn’t)