The software itself has matured significantly in the last year as well - highly recommend taking a look at this if you're building new pipelines or have a need to upgrade existing ones.
While there are many things we're working on, there are 3 goals that got me excited about working on this system:
1. Local development: most modern workflow orchestration systems don't have a good local development story. We want to provide a seamless end-to-end dev experience from your laptop to CI to dev to prod for authoring data workflows.
2. Complexity: the Airflow deployments I've worked on or otherwise encountered have hundreds of DAGs and thousands of tasks scheduled on an hourly or daily cadence. We aim to provide abstractions to better support managing and wrangling that complexity.
3. Testability: Most modern data platforms are poorly tested. Many orchestration systems, like Airflow, tend to hardcode deployment concerns the business logic, e.g. EmrAddStepsOperator. With Dagster, we aim to separate the business logic from environmental concerns to make it easy to swap out an external resource implementation for a mock, dev version, etc.
Hope that makes sense!
