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A Review Of Airflow-Based And Cloud-Native Approaches For Workflow Orchestration In Devops

Basheer Ahmedu Basha
Principal Build and Release Engineer IEEE Member,USA
tajiir 2026
VOL. 8 / NO. 10 OCTOBER
VOLUME 8
ISSUE 10
YEAR 2026
PAGES 55-64

Abstract

Workflow orchestration has become an essential component of modern DevOps environments to automate, schedule, monitor, and coordinate complex software and data workflows. To create scalable and robust operations, use cloud-native techniques and CI/CD. Apache Airflow provides a DAG-based solution to task dependency, scheduling, monitoring and distributed process execution. This analysis examines cloud-native and Airflow-based workflow orchestration methods with a focus on their design, attributes, pros, cons, scalability, fault tolerance, resource consumption and complexity. To assess the advancement of workflow orchestration and the role Airflow plays in modern DevOps workflows, researchers examine past research. Researchers review past studies to gauge the evolution of workflow orchestration and the role that Airflow plays in modern DevOps pipelines. The review also looks into new strategies for cloud-native security, automated scaling, multi-cloud orchestration, machine learning-based failure prediction, and observability. The study indicates that cloud-native orchestration provides greater scalability, automation, resilience, and flexibility in infrastructure, while Airflow provides strong dependency management capability, flexibility in scheduling, monitoring, and extensibility. There are still challenges in real-time processing, complexity in operations, cost management, multi-cloud environments, and adaptive orchestration. The highlighted research gaps highlight the need for intelligent and comprehensive orchestration frameworks that integrate cloud-native technologies, predictive analytics, and workflow management. Overall, results indicate that the cloud-native orchestration framework along with the DAG-based workflow management can provide a scalable and flexible foundation for modern workflow automation in DevOps.

Keywords

Cloud Computing Apache Airflow Cloud-Native Orchestration Workflow DevOps

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