Product Sketch: Airflow, The Game
Turn your ragtag data jobs into an unstoppable juggernaut
Hail, data peons! I bear tidings of change to your miserable lives!
Our mission at Glacier Studios is to create the most epic interactive experiences imaginable for the modern data gig. Today, I am proud to announce our kidnapped motivated team of dwarven engineers has finalized our first release, OrchCraft: Orcs & Stakeholders.
OrchCraft is the first real-time strategy game that actually does your job for you. Our infrastructure-as-a-video-game platform transforms your tangled pipelines into a sprawling empire you can govern in real-time.
So data engineers, put down your tedious tables of DAG statuses. Set aside your inscrutable “hybrid architecture” diagrams. Forget your frustrations with YAML indentation.
With OrchCraft, your nagging sense of constant failure will transform into a torrent of datalust. All you require is strategy, guts, and a thirst for glory.
Something need doing?
Your journey to global glory starts with your compute town hall and four peons. These puny workers can be coerced to do basic operational tasks, such as executing queries, running Python scripts, and hitting external API endpoints.
As you build your encampment, your simple town will grow into a glorious capital populated by a host of warriors — grunts eager to tackle Airbyte or Fivetran loads, warg riders to raid low-quality data encampments, shamans to turn your lifeless tables into extradimensional warriors. With each new branch of your tech tree, you’ll have more ways to fend off greedy humans breathing data requests down your neck.
In fact, with OrchCraft’s 100+ pre-built data integrations, you’ll spend more time than ever in the command seat and less time debugging mechanical malfunctions. Memories of jumping between command line, code IDEs and web interfaces will become campfire tales, replaced with tactical conversations about data movement, enforcing domain boundaries, and keeping witless data scientists from bringing your platform to a screeching halt.
Battle Time
Whether you fight on the frigid Azure Fields, the dense tangles of the Amazon Forest, or the ethereal Cloud Platform, OrchCraft transforms your abstract platform into a city burgeoning with industry and purpose.
Our patented concept of Battle Time helps you keep your armies running smoothly. Battle Time allows you to simulate a full 24 hour revolution of your platform in as little as fifteen minute intervals. No more will you have to consult the augur to know if pipelines will fail in the future — simply watch it unfurl in front of your eyes, whenever you wish.
By learning and analyzing your troops’ victories and losses, OrchCraft’s Battle Engine is able to simulate your vulnerabilities and proactively test your mettle.
Sloppy scripting from a new dev? Watch out as your carefully planned artillery attack breaks down in front of your eyes.
Do your source schemas constantly change? Beware of night elf assassins taking out valuable sorcerers.
Is a new compliance initiative just around the corner? Prepare for the apocalypse!
With OrchCraft, you’ll finally get to burn down your sprint story points the proper way — in a rain of fiery missiles launched from your platform!
Explore and Exploit
Enterprise customers have access to additional campaign missions and side quests so their teams can do maximal damage with data. Our team has mapped hundreds of hours of common data team requests — replication from internal systems, data modeling challenges, brokering multi-department alliances — into a series of puzzling platform challenges tied together with a riveting storyline.
All of these challenges can be done with no risk to existing infrastructure, and with the option to import these resources back into your main environment. Since all actions taken in OrchCraft are backed with code, chieftains can replicate encampments to additional theaters of war — for example, promote battle-proven processes to an untouchable Valhalla environment — or revert to a previously saved state with the touch of a button.
Become a Legend
Aspiring engineers can quit fretting about finding the right projects to demonstrate their skills— every OrchCraft warlord is registered to a global leaderboard. No more adding “managed 1000s of pipelines” to the resume — simply send them the Twitch replay of that legendary battle with TPC-DS. Forget about “serving dozens of stakeholders” — show them stakeholder-slewn stats to make clear how ruthlessly you can publish data. For those in training — or with axes to grind — get access to thousands of replays of rival datalords to learn how to best even these global superpowers.
Clandestine Operation
Of course, not everyone likes the idea of data engineers enjoying their jobs.
For those customers who work — Mannoroth forbid — in an office, simply activate Zug Zug mode and watch as our sorcerors polymorph your encampment — sprawling cities, hordes of workers, dynamic battlefields — into the Airflow user interface. If that doesn’t prove to colleagues how much you’re willing to sacrifice for the glory of your horde, we can’t help you.
OrchCraft can be obtained by sacrificing your least favorite uncle to Mannoroth, Dark Lord of Chaos, or on Steam for $59.99. And keep your seers alert for Glacier Studios’ next game —World of OrchCraft: Analyst Annihilation, an immersive RPG in which your outnumbered data consumers fight to keep the land pure of false knights and abominable half-truths.
For the horde!
Thrash’kalos TruthCrusher
Chief Executive Orch
On my way to sacrifice my favorite uncle! During a recent townhall, a messenger read from a parchment scroll that the walls around the Azure fields and Amazon forrests are not impermeable to malicious thieves out to steal your precious data, veiled by the night. It is recommended to authorise access at the dataset level. How do you do this without overexerting your warriors with distracting access request side missions?