Question 1

What's the difference between Cloud Composer and Apache Airflow?

Accepted Answer

Apache Airflow is the open-source workflow orchestrator you run and manage yourself. Cloud Composer is Google Cloud’s managed service for Airflow, meaning Google manages much of the infrastructure, scaling, and operational work while you focus on writing and operating DAGs.

Question 2

When should I use Cloud Composer?

Accepted Answer

Use Cloud Composer when you need to orchestrate multi-step workflows with dependencies (for example, ingest → transform → quality checks → publish) and you want Airflow’s flexibility without managing the underlying platform. It’s a good fit for coordinating pipelines across services like BigQuery, Cloud Storage, Dataproc, Dataflow, and external systems via APIs.

Question 3

How much does Cloud Composer cost?

Accepted Answer

Costs depend on the Composer environment size and the underlying resources it uses (such as compute, storage, and networking). Pricing is influenced by factors like the number of workers, how long they run, workload concurrency, and data egress. For accurate estimates, size the environment for your expected DAG frequency and parallelism, and review the current Cloud Composer pricing page and the costs of dependent services your DAGs call.

Cloud Composer

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