Motivation and Concepts

What is maestro?

maestro is an R package for creating and orchestrating many data pipelines in R. If you have several batch jobs/pipelines that you want to schedule and monitor from within a single R project, then maestro is for you. All you do is decorate R functions with special roxygen2 tags and then execute an orchestrator script:

Why do I need maestro?

Running data pipelines is an essential component of data engineering. It is not unusual to have dozens of pipelines that need to run at different frequencies, and when you go to deploy these pipelines scheduling and monitoring them quickly becomes unwieldy. Perhaps you’ve considered moving to heftier orchestration suites such as Airflow, Dagster, and others which require learning entirely new skills and pose their own challenges with deployment. maestro allows you to orchestrate your pipelines entirely in R. All you then need is an environment to deploy your maestro project.

Pipelines

A pipeline is some process that takes raw data (often from an external source) and moves it somewhere else often transforming it along the way. Think of a pipeline as a factory assembly line where data is the raw material. As this data travels along the pipeline, it undergoes various transformations—such as cleaning, aggregation, and analysis—making it increasingly refined and valuable. The refined product is then stored in a new location where it can be used either by an end consumer or another pipeline. The prototypical type of pipeline in data engineering is ETL (Extract, Transform, Load), where data is extracted from a source, transformed, then loaded into storage.

Scheduled Batch Processing

The pipeline needs to run regularly and automatically to process new data. Most analytic workloads undergo batch processing - the processing of data in discrete timed batches. In scheduled batch processing, you as the engineer decide how often you want your pipeline to run (every day at 12:00?, every hour on the 15th minute?).

In maestro a pipeline is an R function with roxygen2 comments for scheduling and configuration:

#' my_pipe maestro pipeline
#'
#' @maestroFrequency 1 day
#' @maestroStartTime 2024-05-24

my_pipe <- function() {

  random_data <- data.frame(
    letters = sample(letters, 10),
    numbers = sample.int(10)
  )
  
  write.csv(random_data, file = tempfile())
}

Orchestrator

An orchestrator is a process that triggers pipelines to run. Think of it as the factory manager who turns on various assembly lines as needed. It also monitors all the pipelines to ensure smooth operation. Just like the factory manager, the orchestrator operates in “shifts” and so needs to be scheduled to perform it’s job too.

Rounded Scheduling

Importantly, maestro needs to know how often you’re going to run the orchestrator. Unlike most orchestration tools out there, maestro isn’t intended to be continuously running, which saves you on compute resources. But this means that pipelines won’t necessarily run exactly when they’re scheduled to. This is a concept we call rounded scheduling.

Let’s say we have a pipeline scheduled to run hourly on the 02 minute mark (e.g., 01:02, 02:02, etc.), and our orchestrator runs every hour on the 00 minute. When the orchestrator runs, it’ll be slightly before the pipeline scheduled time, but it’ll trigger the pipeline anyway because it’s close enough within the frequency of the orchestrator. If instead our orchestrator ran every 15 minutes, it’d still only execute the pipeline once in the hour. But if we underprovisioned the orchestrator and ran it only every day, then the pipeline would only execute once a day. So an important guideline is that the orchestrator needs to run at least as frequency as your highest frequency pipeline.

In maestro an orchestrator is an R script or Quarto like this:

library(maestro)

schedule <- build_schedule()

run_schedule(
  schedule,
  orch_frequency = "1 hour"
)

By passing the orch_frequency = "1 hour" to run_schedule(), we’re saying that we intend to run the orchestrator every 1 hour.

Comparison with other packages

{R} targets

targets is a “pipeline tool for statistics and data science in R”. If you have multiple connected components of a pipeline, targets skips computation of tasks that are up-to-date. targets seems to be primarily used for projects with a single output (e.g., model, document) where there are multiple steps that cumulatively take a long time to complete. In contrast, maestro is focused on projects with multiple independent pipelines. Moreover, maestro pipelines are primarily used when the up-to-dateness of the source data is unknown (e.g., coming from an API or database), unlike in targets where it determines the up-to-dateness based on the contents of a file.

That said, targets and maestro may be complimentary in a single project. One possible case would be to use maestro to orchestrate targets pipelines for tasks such as ETL (e.g., maestro kicks off the pipeline but then downstream computations are avoided if there’s no new data from source). This is a possible exciting integration that we hope to investigate further!

{Python} dagster

Dagster is an “open source orchestration platform for the development, production, and observation of data assets”. Like maestro, dagster uses decorators (special comments) to configure data assets (functions). Unlike maestro, dagster is primarily for chaining together dependent components of a multi-step pipeline - a DAG. It also supports a developer UI and is more fully developed than maestro at the current time.

DAG support is something we’ve considered for maestro. It seems feasible but would be a dramatic step up in the complexity of the package. Conceivably, you could tag maestro pipelines to form a dependency graph and then maestro would validate the graph and coordinate the chaining and passing of data from one component to the next.

When to not use maestro?

While maestro can be used for almost any data engineering task that can be performed in R, there are cases where it is less appropriate to use it.

Streaming and Event-driven

maestro does not support streaming (i.e., continuous) or event-driven pipelines. Only batch processes can be run in maestro.

Hundreds of pipelines

Although there is no hard limit to the number of pipelines you can run in maestro (and there are ways of maximizing its efficiency as the number of pipelines increases, such as using multiple cores), we advise against using maestro to run this many pipelines - at least not in a single project. There are several reasons for this: (1) the orchestrator execution time will be become a problem even with multiple cores; (2) organizing and keeping track of this many pipelines in a single R project becomes difficult; (3) the number of dependencies to manage in the project will likely balloon.

If you wish to continue using maestro in this scenario, then our recommendation is to split the jobs into multiple projects all running on maestro.

Nevertheless, if you have hundreds of jobs to run it’s likely an indicator that your enterprise has matured out of maestro into something a bit more sophisticated.

High frequency jobs

If you have pipelines that need to run every minute or less you may want to look for a solution that supports near real time or real time data processing. The orchestrator may have trouble keeping up if it’s scheduled to run this often.

Multiple languages (R + Python)

maestro is for R pipelines only. Using reticulate may help with Python in a pinch though.