Ability to temporarily stop Airflow planned?

Hi!

There are not immediate plans to be able to pause/resume an MWAA environment, however for development environments one option is to use CloudFormation to create an on-demand environment, with connections defined in AWS Secrets Manager. Logs will be preserved in CloudWatch while the environment is deleted, and if the replacement environment uses the same name as the previous environment then the logs should resume in the same place in CloudWatch.

Thanks!

Hi,

I may have an hint and understand why this service cannot be stopped and then started that being a managed service but ...

We are considering in adopting the managed service MWAA and what concerns me is what happens to metadata configs. if the service is gone or stopped on a PROD env. ?
There's no access to the metadata db, no full access to the footprint of the service so we cant perform a disaster recovery activity and restore to the previous state.
Another question is why cant exec. metadata DB be accessible or explicitly to be able to manage it on a service like RDS safekeeping everything giving more control to operations?

thanks for all your work. We hope to be able to adopt this service in our ecosystem too.

BR
Pedro M.

Edited by: pedromach on Jan 8, 2021 6:55 AM

Hi Pedro,

Meta DB access was restricted both for stability of the service and to enable simpler setup. Customers have access to the meta DB through their DAGs, demonstrated by the clean up DAG sample here: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/mwaa/latest/userguide/samples-database-cleanup.html

The meta DB is a multi-AZ RDS Postgres instance unique to that particular environment and as such disaster recovery should not be required, however you are correct that for production systems we would recommend that the MWAA environment is left running and not recreated on-demand.

Thanks!

Thanks, that answered my question :)

Hello,
unfortunately, I need to re-open this issue. We tested the start-stop (=create & destroy) mechanism of MWAA and it seems like the meta database is not being recovered. I can see my logs in CloudWatch but all task runs are not displayed in Airflow itself. Is there a way to keep also the Meta-Database entries?

Hi,

MWAA does not automatically recover the meta database. Before deleting the environment, you would need to use a DAG to offload the meta data to an external DB, and then use a similar dag to reload meta data on the new environment.

Thanks!

Do you have an example for such a DAG.

You can refer to this Git Repo for the metadata export DAG and even try the environment Start and Stop method if it suits you! https://github.com/aws-samples/amazon-mwaa-examples/tree/main/usecases/start-stop-mwaa-environment/mwaairflow/assets/dags/2.5.1