"Why not just use a cron job?" is the first question I get whenever someone sees an Airflow DAG. Fair question. Cron works. It's been around for decades. It's simple.
The real answer isn't that cron is bad — it's that cron solves a different problem than Airflow does.
Cron is a job scheduler. It runs a command at a fixed time. That's it. It doesn't know whether the command succeeded, whether its dependencies are satisfied, or whether it should even run at all today. It just fires the command and moves on.
Airflow is a workflow orchestrator. It doesn't just schedule tasks — it models them as a graph of dependencies, tracks their state, retries failed ones, and gives you a UI to see what ran, what failed, and why.
Here's where that difference actually matters.
