CL-228 Cloud & Platform

Workflow Orchestration with Airflow

Author Airflow pipelines that can be rerun, backfilled and paged on without producing duplicates or silence. Learners build DAGs with task groups and dynamic mapping, make tasks idempotent, replay a corrected window without double-loading, and instrument failure alerting that reaches a named owner with a runbook attached.

B3Practitioner

5modules

39skill atoms

1role journey

Curriculum

What this course covers.

5 modules, 39 named skill atoms. Expand any module to see them.

1DAG Authoring7 skill atoms

DAG objects, schedules and default_argsTaskFlow API against classic operator syntaxdependencies with bitshift and chaindynamic task mapping with expandtask groups for a readable graphtop-level code parsed on every scheduler loopimport errors and parse-time budgets

2Operators, Hooks and Connections8 skill atoms

PythonOperator, BashOperator and provider operatorshooks wrapping external system connectionsconnections and variables served through the Task Execution APIsecrets backend as the credential sourcesecrets backend for credentialsKubernetesPodOperator for isolated workloadsdeferrable operators and the triggerercustom operator against a plain callable

3Scheduling, Catchup and Backfills9 skill atoms

logical date against wall-clock execution timecron expressions and custom timetablescatchup default False in Airflow 3 and opting back in deliberatelyDAG versioningscheduler-managed backfillsmax_active_runs and pool concurrency limitsbackfilling a corrected date windowidempotent tasks safe to rerundelete-then-insert to avoid duplicate rows

4Sensors, Assets and Data Passing8 skill atoms

poke against reschedule sensor modesExternalTaskSensor across DAG boundariesassets and asset-driven scheduling with @assetwatchers for event-driven triggersXCom size limits and metadata database pressurecustom XCom backend for larger payloadspassing pointers rather than payloadssensor deadlock consuming every worker slot

5Reliability and Observability7 skill atoms

retries, retry_delay and exponential backoffSLA misses and execution timeoutson_failure_callback routed to Slack or PagerDutytask duration trends and the Gantt viewzombie tasks and scheduler heartbeatalert fatigue from a noisy DAGa runbook per DAG owned by a named team

Where it fits

CL-228 in a role journey.

This course appears in 1 of our 45 role journeys. Here is what a learner takes immediately before and after it in each.

Data Engineer

Practitioner stage

CL-225→CL-228→CL-204

Roles this course serves

Data Engineer

The capability ladder

This course is authored to band B3.

Every course we run is written to one rung of the CASI ladder, so a plan can be assembled to take a team from where they are to where they need to be.

What do B1–B6 mean?The CASI Capability Ladder — click to expand

Every course targets a band on the CASI Capability Ladder — our six-band proficiency scale, anchored to open standards (O*NET, ESCO, NICE, NIST AI RMF, Bloom's). A band tells you how deep a course goes, and what evidence proves it.

What the learner can doTypical evidence

AwareUnderstands concepts and vocabulary; uses tools with guidance

Knowledge checks

FoundationPerforms standard tasks correctly in familiar contexts

Guided labs, autograded exercises

PractitionerDelivers complete pieces of work independently

Scenario labs, proctored hands-on exams

ProfessionalHandles production-grade complexity, trade-offs and failure modes

Break-fix drills, design defenses

AdvancedEngineers systems end-to-end under constraints; leads others

Rubric-scored capstones, vivas

ExpertSets direction; recognised authority across teams

Portfolio + panel evaluation

A note on B6. Courses in this catalog target B1–B5. B6 is not taught — it is recognised, through a portfolio and a panel, once someone is setting direction for others. Every journey here is built to land a learner at B5.

Other Cloud courses at this level.

CL-107

Run CL-228 for your team.

This course runs at several lengths depending on how deep you need to go and how much of it your people already have. Tell us who is being trained and we will scope it.

Add it to a training plan Talk to our team Check your team’s level free

Workflow Orchestration with Airflow

What this course covers.

CL-228 in a role journey.

Data Engineer

Roles this course serves

This course is authored to band B3.

Other Cloud courses at this level.

PostgreSQL for Cloud Engineers

Serverless Engineering on AWS (Lambda · DynamoDB)

Snowflake Core Engineering

Analytics Engineering with dbt

Enterprise BI with Power BI & Tableau

Kubernetes Administration

Run CL-228 for your team.