Hi everyone,

I'd like to start a discussion about a new feature we'd like to add to
Airflow we call "setup and tear down tasks"

https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/AIRFLOW/AIP-52+Automatic+setup+and+teardown+tasks

Lets start with a code example, that if you are familiar with
unittest.TestCase I hope will be familiar and you can guess what the
effect would be:

```
from airflow import DAG, task, setup, teardown
  
  
with DAG(dag_id='test'):
    @setup
    def create_cluster():
        ...
        return cluster_id
  
    @task
    def load(ti):
        # Example:
        cluster_id = ti.xcom_pull(task_id="create_cluster")
  
    def summarize():
        ...
  
    @teardown(on_failure_fail_dagrun=False)
    def teardown_cluster():
        ...
       cluster_id = ti.xcom_pull(task_id="create_cluster")
  
    create_cluster()
    load() >> summarize()
    teardown_cluster()
```

(This has been an itch of mine that I've had since I first started using
Airflow back in 2017!)

We go in to quite a bit of detail about the semantics and behaviours of
these new task types, but the tl;dr (copied from the AIP doc)

Add a new syntax for marking tasks as setup/teardown that:

 * Teardown tasks will still run even if the upstream tasks have
   otherwise failed
 * Teardown tasks failing don't always result in the DagRun being marked
   as failed (up to DAG author to choose failure mode)
 * Automatically clear setup/teardown tasks when clearing a dependent
   task

I'm not sure when we'll start a vote on this due to the holiday season,
but we'd like to start working on this in January.

-ash

Reply via email to