Dagster.
Dagster is a data orchestrator organised around assets rather than tasks. Pipelines declare the data they produce, so the system knows what exists, what it depends on, and what is stale — rather than only which steps ran.
Where Dagster fits on a long engagement.
Declaring assets instead of tasks changes what the orchestrator can tell you. A task-based scheduler knows a job succeeded; an asset-based one knows which table it produced, what that table depends on, when it was last refreshed and what downstream is now stale. That is the difference between "the pipeline ran" and "the numbers are current".
Dagster also takes testing seriously in a way most orchestrators do not. Assets are ordinary functions with declared inputs, so they can be unit tested without a scheduler, and resources can be swapped for local equivalents. Data pipelines are notoriously untested, and the tooling is a large part of why.
What an assigned team does with Dagster.
Freshness policies are what turn orchestration into something a business can rely on. An asset declaring it should be no more than six hours old produces an alert when it is not, rather than a report that is quietly stale until someone notices.
Setting those expectations is a conversation about what the business needs; holding them is what the assigned specialists answer for, which is the division described in how an assignment runs.
What we use Dagster for.
- Lineage the platform already knows Dependencies declared, so impact of a change is answerable without tracing code.
- Staleness surfaced automatically Freshness policies that alert before someone presents an out-of-date number.
- Pipelines under test Assets tested as functions, so a transformation change is verified before it runs on real data.
How Dagster capacity is assigned.
Orchestration capacity is assigned under managed data services, with freshness expectations agreed from the business need rather than set to a default.
Tell us what your roadmap needs Dagster for.
A service delivery manager replies with the disciplines we would assign, the monthly capacity and what the first month looks like.
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