Airflow is an open source platform for authoring and monitoring data pipelines. It was developed at Airbnb to address challenges like opaque data lineage, steep learning curves as ecosystems grow, duplicated code, and scattered operational metadata. Airflow uses a Python-based DAG (directed acyclic graph) definition to programmatically author pipelines. It has a rich CLI and web UI and uses technologies like Python, Celery, Flask, SQLAlchemy, and Jinja. Operators allow running tasks like SQL queries, transfers, and sensors. Airflow has been scaled to process thousands of tasks daily across many teams and companies.