Prefect just bought Dagster, another big Airflow rival — and it’s not a data pipeline story

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source data pipeline and workflow orchestrator, has announced that it’s acquiring Dagster , one of the biggest alternatives to Apache Airflow alongside Prefect itself. The deal, which has yet to formally close, folds two of the most established Airflow challengers into a single company. Dagster, the open-source orchestrator, and Dagster+ , the fully managed cloud incarnation, will keep their existing names, pricing, and product roadmaps, with some 40 people from the Dagster team moving over to Prefect as part of the deal. In a LinkedIn post published on Monday, Prefect founder and CEO Jeremiah Lowin explains that the acquisition is a bet on the various components an AI agent needs to run reliably: clearly defined goals, paired with the flexibility to improvise when its own decisions send it down a path nobody scripted. Dagster, according to Lowin, handles the goal-setting side by...