Survey of 5,800 Data Engineers Reveals Airflow 3 Adoption Gap and Open-Source Trends
Astronomer's 2026 State of Apache Airflow report, described as the largest data engineering survey ever, gathered responses from 5,818 practitioners across 122 countries between September and November 2025. Apache Airflow now counts over 3,600 unique contributors, surpassing both Apache Spark and Apache Kafka by significant margins, signaling strong ecosystem momentum. Despite Airflow 3 launching in April 2025, only 26% of respondents have completed migration, while 84% of those still on version 2.x say they plan to upgrade. The slow adoption is attributed to breaking changes requiring extensive DAG rewrites, making the transition a weeks-long effort for teams managing hundreds of pipelines. The urgency is real: Airflow 2 reached end of life in April 2026, meaning no further security patches, bug fixes, or provider package updates will be issued.
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