Astro architecture

Astro is a managed service for data orchestration that is built for the cloud and powered by Apache Airflow. Your Airflow infrastructure is managed entirely by Astronomer, enabling you to shift your focus from infrastructure to data.

General architecture

There are two ways to run Astro:

• Astro Hosted is a version of Astro that's hosted and managed on Astronomer's Cloud. This version of Astro is ideal if you want to run Airflow with as little friction as possible.
• Astro Hybrid is a version of Astro that's managed by Astronomer, but your Airflow infrastructure is hosted in your company's cloud. This version of Astro is ideal for companies that want more control over their cloud infrastructure.

Astro Hosted consists of three core components for managing Airflow, all hosted on Astronomer's cloud:

• The Astro control plane is Astronomer's interface for managing your Airflow environments in the cloud. It includes the Cloud UI, the Astro CLI, and Cloud API.
• An Astro cluster comprises all the components necessary to host multiple Airflow Deployments, including the network, database, and compute resources.
• A Deployment is an Airflow environment running on Astro. Each Deployment includes all of the core Airflow components, plus additional Astronomer tooling that help you optimize resource usage, observability, and security.

Astro Deployments can securely connect to external data services so that you can place Airflow at the heart of your data ecosystem.

To learn more about Astro Hybrid architecture and features, see Astro Hybrid overview

Access control architecture

Astro implements role-based access control (RBAC) for Airflow environments.

All users belong to an Organization, which is the highest level in the RBAC system. Each Organization contains a collection of Workspaces, clusters, and users.

• A Workspace is a collection of Deployments that can be accessed by a specific group of users. You can use Workspaces to group Deployments that share a business use case or environment trait.
• A cluster is a Kubernetes cluster that hosts the infrastructure required to run Deployments. Clusters can host Deployments from multiple Workspaces. You either use pre-configured clusters on Astro or provision your own dedicated clusters with more specific configurations.

Each Astro user has a Workspace role in each Workspace they belong to, plus a single Organization role. Users can also belong to Teams, which apply the same role across a group of users. You can create API keys with specific roles to automate most actions on Astro, such as deploying code or managing users.

Use the following diagram as a reference for how all of these components interact with each other in Astro.