Hello everyone,

I think in Airflow 2 it's  hard to find what kind of options you have for
logs, secrets, authentication.

For all those, we do not have a single place where people could gather all
the options and where people can find them easily. I think complete
separation out of particular logs, secrets to providers and defferring most
authentication information to FAB (without being explicit about it) made it
quite difficult to find how to do it all.

I've learned that people are finding better answers in Stack Overflow
questions than in our documentation and this is not a good sign. Example
slack discussion for LDAP authentication
https://apache-airflow.slack.com/archives/CCQ7EGB1P/p1628782373128600 which
ended up with recommendation to
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65946118/how-to-setup-ldap-authentication-in-airflow-2-0
(but there were many more of those)

Also it's not really easy to figure out configuring Oauth - I struggled
with it myself few weeks ago and figured it out eventually, but still not
fully (role mapping is not explained anywhere for one - at least not that I
am aware of).

When I searched for anything useful, more often than not I was redirected
to Airflow 1.10 documentation that had some kind of overview of possible
options. But it's not really existing in Airflow.

I cannot find pages summarising the available (Airflow community managed)
deployment options such as remote log configuration. Some details (but
without comprehensive examples) are available in providers (which is a good
place for example the remote loggers belong to their providers), but you
need to know you should look for them there - and it is not at all obvious.

I think it would be great to extend our documentation pages with:

* Available  Authentication options with examples (even if most of the
documentation is in FAB, it is rather difficult to map Airflow
configuration into FAB one - at least it's not obvious which part is FAB,
which part is Airflow, where to put what, how to configure roles etc.):
LDAP, Oauth, Google, .......

* List (and link) available logging options at
https://airflow.apache.org/docs/apache-airflow/stable/logging-monitoring/logging-tasks.html?highlight=remote%20log#advanced-configuration
.You will not find list of implemented integrations in this page - you
should look for details of advanced logging in providers (but it's not at
all obvious where and that they exist at all). There are no links to S3/GCS
logging configuration/handling and it's not easy to find out where you
should look for them. Better examples would also be useful.

* Secret Backends page is a bit better -
https://airflow.apache.org/docs/apache-airflow/stable/security/secrets/secrets-backend/index.html.
At least it mentions GCP/Hashicorp as "examples" but it misses AWS one and
when you go to "Supported Backends" you see only the "Local Filesystem"one.
I think it is really misleading that you do not have a full list of secret
backends in the community-managed providers.

I think in all those cases there was a good intention - not to repeat what
is written somewhere else and not to add "all community providers specific
implementation", because they are separated out and we should treat the
providers as "separate" from core and put documentation there.

However I think the usefulness of the documentation suffered by this
change- some level of redundancy and making useful information in the place
where people are looking for it rather than somewhere else where it is "the
single source of truth" is not the best idea for the useful documentation.
While this is OK for "operators/sensors" etc. as this is pretty "obvious"
they are in "providers", when it comes to common features such as
authentication, logging, secrets, I think having single page with
comprehensive overview what is available for those is rather useful

I'd love to hear other's opinion -maybe it's just me,  but I would prefer
to see in one place all the options I have with authentication, logging
configuration, secrets - at least nicely indexed with comprehensive list of
options I have for the community and links to the exact places where more
details are provided.

Let me know what you think.

J.

-- 
+48 660 796 129

Reply via email to