Getting Started with Prefect | Task Orchestration & Data Workflows

A big challenge for many data teams is orchestrating all of the tools within their data stack.

Fortunately, there are tools designed to address this exact issue (task orchestration) and make our lives as data engineers easier.

So in today's video, I want to show you how to use a great open-source task orchestration tool called Prefect that you can use to orchestrate and monitor your entire stack from a single location.

It has a great UI, is designed with data tools in mind and only requires basic Python knowledge to get started.

By the end of this video you'll understand what Prefect is all about and how you can start using it in your own data stack.

Thank you for watching!

Timestamps:
00:00 - Intro
00:44 - What is Prefect?
02:32 - Install Prefect
04:48 - Create a Python Script
06:44 - Add a flow
07:42 - Add a task
08:45 - Add a subflow
09:49 - Intro to Deployments
12:03 - Create a Deployment
15:17 - Start an Agent
16:48 - Use Prefect Cloud
20:25 - Using Blocks
23:09 - Version Control & Storage w/ GitHub
26:07 - Automations & Task Concurrency

Title & Tags:
Getting Started with Prefect | Task Orchestration & Data Workflows
#kahandatasolutions #dataengineering #prefect

[shaqeer]

Very easy to follow as a complete beginner. It would be amazing to update the second half of the tutorial as new versions of prefect changed the way deployments are done. Thanks.

[soudaminipanda]

Excellent presentation. Everything is so tightly packaged. No unnecessary stuff. Amazing job.

[ibowman_UCLA_BRAIN]

Mind-blowingly succinct tutorial, better than the official Prefect docs. Love how you used a simple "hello world" script as an example. Your description of deployments and agents was particularly helpful. Would love to see an example using a Docker container as storage in the future. Will show this to other programmers on my team. Thank you!

[GoonCity]

This is the easiest & best explanation I’ve seen on this. It’s so chock full of great content I had to watch it in 1x & 1.25x to grasp it. The rest were slogs

[royale]

Wow, I love this tutorial. Thank you for the videos, and I have been receiving your updates on my email. Thanks man

[sergiogalo]

as always, this is another amazing video. Thank you very much Michael!
oh I ve got a question, the image (I assume its a website) from 0:03, can you share that link please? thanks in advance

[hoanglam]

Thank you so much. I am currently looking for a simple solution to create a CI/CD ETL pipeline :D I think I would use Prefect with GIthub and Docker

[kgene]

Excellent tutorial, thank you for your efforts. I've been trying to get Prefect standardized in my company but I was shaky in deployments/agents/blocks areas. One complaint I have (which is really minor but for me is paiful) is there is too much mouse movements on the screen. PLEASE don't move your mouse so much on the screen. It hurts my eyes and I have a headache after watching it for more than 5-10 minuts.

Other than this minor nitpick I appreciate your videos very much. Keep up the good work.

[JebliMohamed]

Great video on Prefect! It's clear how it helps with managing data tools. I'm interested in how to add Prefect to an existing project running sequential Tasks using OpenAI's API assistants?

[heliyahasani]

prefect explanation ! 🤣 Amazing content easy and simple to follow. Thanks for your effort it helped me a lot ! 💛

[usbornestreet]

Great tutorial + narration by Louis CK!

[AnhNguyen-hjpd]

I'M really enjoy your video bro! Keep up the great work!!!!

[myrsinivak]

Thank you Kahan, great starting point for Prefect.

One question in case you have some input - I am building workflow capability in my application. I want to allow my app's users to customize and setup their own business workflows. As part of each workflow they can setup different tasks to run from a task pool I am giving them.

I came across Prefect and was wondering if it applies in my case. I very much understand the usage of Prefect when it comes to building more static flows or for development / infrastructure teams to automate tasks. But I am wondering if using it to implement a service for users where they customize their own workflows is a good practice.

Using Prefect's task state management, ordering, retry policies, etc will be useful but I wanna make sure I am not putting overhead in my app unreasonably.

If there is any input on that I would really appreciate it, thank you!

[AndresOjedacorchuelo]

very good video but leave some questions how do I work with .sql scripts defined in specific path could you give me an example and how can I make them execute at a certain time like airflow that works within the same day

[juanadearco]

Do you mind doing a tutorial on difference between a prefect future and a prefect state and when you would use them in your pipeline?

[dharmanambi]

I like your videos it is simple and easy to follow, I am moving into data architect / data engineering role is there a way to share the first screen grouped by BI, Transform, extract etc.. Thanks

[harrywang]

Hello @Kahan, first, I want to thank you for the great video! It does help me start prefect from scratch. I just have one headache regarding the agent part. As you have shown, I already deployed my workflow to prefect cloud. But it kept saying that my work queue is unhealthy. I figured out that it could be because that I did not start an agent. Then I started an agent using the command you showed, in Visual Studio Code. But once I exited visual studio, my agent will be terminated, thus my workflow can't be run on a schedule. Is there anyway to fix this problem (e.g. let the agent run as always, not depend on VScode)? Thank you very much!

[krtmlry]

I wish prefect would add more to their documentation, or maybe create something similar to dagster university for better understanding of their product :/

[DhrubajyotiSinha-bh]

1 Insufficient memory. preemption: 0/1 nodes are available: 1 No preemption victims found for incoming pod. how to fix?

[shahidilhan]

is "prefect server start" the same as "prefect orion start"?