Google Cloud Composer — Apache Airflow in-built and more!

In this blog, we will only discuss what Cloud Composer is and in which scenarios where it can be helpful.

Google Cloud Composer is a managed workflow orchestration service that is built on Apache Airflow. It aims to make workflow creation and management easier, more powerful, and consistent.

Image courtesy Google Cloud Community

With Cloud Composer, you can automate, schedule, and monitor your data pipelines, ETL processes, and other workflows in a cloud-native and scalable manner. Here’s a breakdown of what Cloud Composer is and some of its advantages.

What is Google Cloud Composer?

Google Cloud Composer provides a managed environment for Apache Airflow, which is an open-source platform designed for orchestrating complex workflows. With Cloud Composer, you get the following benefits:

1. Managed Service: Google takes care of the infrastructure, scaling, and maintenance, allowing you to focus on designing and running your workflows.
2. Integration with GCP: It seamlessly integrates with other Google Cloud Platform (GCP) services, making it easy to interact with GCP components like BigQuery, Cloud Storage, and more.
3. Security and Compliance: Cloud Composer leverages GCP’s security and compliance features, ensuring that your workflows are running in a secure environment.
4. Automatic Updates: Google Cloud Composer automatically updates the Airflow environment, ensuring you have access to the latest features and bug fixes.
5. Scalability: It provides autoscaling, so you don’t have to worry about resource limitations as your workflow demands grow.
6. Monitoring and Logging: Integrated monitoring and logging tools make it easy to track the performance of your workflows.

Now, let’s look at a real-world scenario where Cloud Composer can be extremely helpful:

Scenario: E-commerce Sales Forecasting

Imagine you work for an e-commerce company, and you need to build a sales forecasting system. You want to collect data from various sources, including website traffic, historical sales data, and external factors like holidays, weather, and marketing campaigns.

How Cloud Composer Can Help:

1. Managed Environment: With Cloud Composer, you can set up your ETL pipeline to collect data from different sources, transform it, and load it into a data warehouse, all within a managed Airflow environment. You don’t have to worry about provisioning and maintaining the infrastructure.
2. Scaling: During the holiday season or major sales events, you can rely on Cloud Composer’s automatic scaling to handle increased data loads. This ensures your forecasting process runs smoothly, even during peak times.
3. Integration with GCP: The sales forecasting system can easily leverage Google Cloud services for data storage, analytics, and machine learning. You can use BigQuery for data warehousing and BigQuery ML for building predictive models.
4. Monitoring and Logging: Cloud Composer provides built-in monitoring and logging, making it easier to track the performance of your pipeline. You can set up alerts and notifications for anomalies.
5. Security: GCP’s security features protect your data and workflows. You can use IAM for access control and VPC Service Controls for network security.
6. Compliance: If your company needs to adhere to specific compliance standards, Google Cloud’s compliance certifications can help meet those requirements.

In this scenario, Cloud Composer simplifies the entire workflow orchestration process. You can quickly develop, test, and deploy your sales forecasting pipeline with less effort and operational overhead. Additionally, you benefit from Google Cloud’s extensive ecosystem and built-in AI and ML capabilities for more advanced forecasting models.

Just thought of adding pricing as well, cost is based on consumption, so you pay for what you use, as measured by vCPU/hour, GB/month, and GB transferred/month.