Orchestration

Why I Run dbt Inside Airflow Docker Container In modern data engineering pipelines, dbt and Airflow often work side by side. One common design decision is how to run dbt alongside Airflow: Should dbt run in its own container, orchestrated via API or CLI call? Or should dbt run directly inside Airflow’s Docker container as part of the DAG? After experimenting with both, I prefer running dbt inside Airflow’s Docker container. ...

If you start working with Airflow a bit more seriously, you’ll quickly notice that it’s usually split into multiple services: airflow-init airflow-scheduler airflow-webserver At first, you may wonder: “Why do we need to split them up like this?” Well — this is actually the standard production architecture. Let’s break it down in simple, practical terms. 1️⃣ airflow-init — Preparation Step Also sometimes called airflow-db-migrate or airflow-bootstrap. This runs only once when you initialize Airflow. ...