Hi all, I'd like to propose a new community provider, apache-airflow-providers-modal, for Modal (https://modal.com/), the serverless compute platform for running functions, GPU jobs and sandboxed containers. Targeting Airflow 3+ and shipping as incubation, same as the Anthropic and OpenAI providers.
Scope of the first version - A modal connection type (token id and secret, optional Modal environment), so Modal credentials live in an Airflow connection and secrets backend rather than in MODAL_TOKEN_ID / MODAL_TOKEN_SECRET on every worker. - ModalHook, which turns that connection into an authenticated modal.Client and hands out handles to deployed functions and classes, secrets, volumes, apps and sandboxes, each scoped to the connection's environment. Execution stays on the Modal SDK objects (.remote(), .spawn(), Sandbox.wait()), so the hook does not re-wrap the SDK. No operators or executor in this first PR. The intent is to land the connection type and hook first, because several things want them: the Modal backend for the common.ai sandbox toolset (#72910) currently has to read ambient credentials, and a ModalExecutor that runs each task in its own Modal sandbox has a working prototype that I'd bring as a follow-up PR once the provider exists to host it. Why a standalone provider rather than a piece of common.ai common.ai is provider-agnostic. Modal is infrastructure, not a model vendor: a connection type, an executor and compute-oriented operators have no home in an AI-neutral interface, and tying non-AI Modal users to common.ai would be the wrong dependency direction. The sandbox backend stays in common.ai and will take an optional modal_conn_id resolved through this hook, which is the same "vendor provider alongside common.ai" split we settled on for Anthropic and OpenAI. Working implementation https://github.com/apache/airflow/pull/73418 I'm happy to steward and sponsor the provider, and would welcome a co-steward per the community provider policy. If there are no objections within seven days I'll proceed with merging. Thanks, Kaxil
