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Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow (MWAA)

What

Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow (MWAA) is AWS's managed hosting for Apache Airflow. Customers bring DAG code (usually via S3); AWS runs the Airflow scheduler, webserver, metastore, and worker fleet, patches the underlying runtime, and handles autoscaling.

Why it appears on the wiki

Referenced in as the "trivial way" to get per-PR Airflow isolation — one MWAA server per pull request. Rejected by Zalando because:

  • Creation takes up to ~30 minutes per new server.
  • Each extra server costs real money.

So instead Zalando kept a single Airflow test server and got per-PR isolation on top of it via DAG-id versioning (creation <1 min, no new compute).

MWAA thus sets the baseline cost against which the article's cheaper-isolation design is measured.

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