What is Amazon MWAA?
Amazon MWAA (Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow) is a managed service for Apache Airflow, the open-source tool used to create, schedule, and monitor workflows. With Amazon MWAA, you can use Airflow and Python to create workflows without managing the underlying infrastructure for scalability, availability, and security. MWAA automatically scales to meet workflow needs and integrates with AWS security services.
Existing Airflow DAGs (Directed Acyclic Graphs) can generally be adopted with minimal changes. DAG files are stored in an S3 bucket, and the MWAA environment loads them automatically. Custom Python packages and Airflow plugins are also supported.
Core Features
- Automatic Airflow Setup: Choose an Airflow version when creating an environment, set up using the familiar open-source interface
- Auto Scaling: Worker capacity scales automatically between defined minimum and maximum limits
- S3-Based DAGs: DAG files are stored in S3 and loaded automatically, enabling easy CI/CD integration
- Built-in Security: Runs in its own VPC, with encryption via AWS KMS and IAM-based access control
- Public or Private Access: Choose publicly accessible or fully VPC-internal access to the Airflow web server
- Monitoring: Airflow logs and metrics directly in Amazon CloudWatch
Typical Use Cases
Data Pipeline Orchestration: Data teams orchestrate complex ETL pipelines that extract data from various sources, transform it, and load it into data warehouses or data lakes.
ETL Workflow Automation: Regularly executed data processing jobs are defined as Airflow DAGs, including scheduling, error handling, retries, and alerting.
ML Pipeline Management: Data science teams use MWAA to orchestrate ML pipelines: data preparation, feature engineering, model training, evaluation, and deployment as an automated workflow chain.
Benefits
- No operational overhead for Airflow infrastructure
- Existing DAGs can be used largely unchanged
- Automatic scaling of worker capacity
- Seamless integration with AWS data and ML services
Integration with innFactory
As an AWS Reseller, innFactory supports you with Amazon MWAA: from migrating existing Airflow environments and developing and optimizing DAGs to integration with AWS data services and building CI/CD pipelines for DAG deployment.
Typical Use Cases
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Amazon MWAA?
Amazon MWAA (Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow) is a managed service for running data pipelines with Apache Airflow in the cloud at scale. It lets you use Airflow and Python to build workflows without managing infrastructure for scalability, availability, and security.
Which Airflow versions are supported?
MWAA supports several Apache Airflow versions to choose from when creating an environment, and is regularly updated with new releases. Starting with Airflow v3, the MWAA web server also hosts the execution API server. The environment can be extended with custom Python packages and plugins.
How are DAGs deployed?
DAGs (Directed Acyclic Graphs) are stored as Python files in an S3 bucket and automatically loaded by the MWAA environment. This makes it easy to connect existing CI/CD pipelines for DAG deployment.
How much does Amazon MWAA cost?
MWAA is billed on a usage basis with no upfront commitment: an hourly rate applies to the environment's base instance, with additional worker, scheduler, and web server instances plus database storage billed separately. MWAA Serverless is also available, billed by actual managed task hours used. Current prices are listed on the official pricing page.
Note: All product information on this page has been compiled with care, but is provided without guarantee and may be outdated or incomplete. Cloud services evolve rapidly — features, pricing, SLAs, and availability change frequently. Authoritative and up-to-date information can only be found on the official product page of AWS (official documentation). This page does not represent an offer by AWS.