What is Prefect?
Prefect is a modern workflow management tool designed to orchestrate data stacks by building, running, and monitoring data pipelines. It is an open-source tool powered by the Prefect Core workflow engine and serves modern project management.
Prefect allows enhancing data pipelines with semantics like retries, dynamic mapping, caching, logging, failure notifications, and more. The negative engineering tool helps create a rich DAG structure with a focus on supporting positive engineering.
How does Prefect help?
Prefect is a complete yet minimal workflow automation platform backed by a strong philosophy of data engineering. It offers comprehensive test coverage, more unit tests, and high-quality documentation than other workflow management tools.
Its modular design simplifies building blocks by customizing or replacing anything from the execution engine, data serialization, logging, and state handling.
Prefect brings an easy way of business processes with Python functions, unlike the tightly constrained and more verbose tasks of Apache Airflow.
Key Features of Prefect
Prefect Python library
The Prefect Python library facilitates components required to design, test, run and build complex data applications. It provides a user-friendly API with no config files, boilerplate and enables workflow orchestration and monitoring with best practices.
Real-time user interface
Prefect comes with a real-time, unified interface that lets you track state updates and logs, begin new runs and capture critical information whenever required. Its dashboard offers insights into summaries of recent runs, descriptions of planned runs, links to error logs, and activity timelines.
Comprehensive task library
Prefect provides a comprehensive and ever-expanding task library with predefined tasks such as shell script execution, sending tweets, or Kubernetes job management.
Rich state objects
Prefect provides rich state objects for transmitting information about tasks and flows. Users can apply custom logic to react to states and learn about tasks/flows - by examining the current state and the history of task states.
Perfectly proven
Developed with the contribution of hundreds of engineers and data scientists, Prefect perfectly complies with best practices, enables web services, and serves data-science bootcamps, MLB teams, and Fortune-100 companies successfully.
