From maintenance to innovation: Checkout's migration to Managed Service for Apache Airflow

Data engineering teams often face a “Day 2” operational reality after building a data platform: the ongoing work of maintaining the orchestrator itself. For the Data Platform team at Checkout.com , managing a self-hosted Apache Airflow environment on another hyperscaler was consuming time the team wanted to spend elsewhere as server management, patching, and incident response were pulling focus from building pipelines. By migrating to Managed Service for Apache Airflow (Gen 3) , Google Cloud’s fully managed Airflow service, Checkout.com transformed its reliability and cost structure.