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Architecture overview

Airbyte is conceptually composed of two parts: platform and connectors.

The platform provides all the horizontal services required to configure and run data movement operations e.g: the UI, configuration API, job scheduling, logging, alerting, etc. and is structured as a set of microservices.

Connectors are independent modules which push/pull data to/from sources and destinations. Connectors are built in accordance with the Airbyte Specification, which describes the interface with which data can be moved between a source and a destination using Airbyte. Connectors are packaged as Docker images, which allows total flexibility over the technologies used to implement them.

A more concrete diagram can be seen below:

  • Web App/UI [airbyte-webapp]: An easy-to-use graphical interface for interacting with the Airbyte Server.
  • Config API Server [airbyte-server, airbyte-server-api]: Airbyte's main controller. All operations in Airbyte such as creating sources, destinations, connections, managing configurations, etc.. are configured and invoked from the API.
  • Database Config & Jobs [airbyte-db]: Stores all the configuration (credentials, frequency...) and job history.
  • Temporal Service [airbyte-temporal]: Manages the scheduling and sequencing task queues and workflows.
  • Worker [airbyte-worker]: Reads from the task queues and executes the connection scheduling and sequencing logic, making calls to the workload API.
  • Workload API [airbyte-workload-api-server]: The HTTP interface for enqueuing workloads — the discrete pods that run the connector operations.
  • Launcher [airbyte-workload-launcher]: Consumes events from the workload API and interfaces with k8s to launch workloads.

The diagram shows the steady-state operation of Airbyte, there are components not described you'll see in your deployment:

  • Cron [airbyte-cron]: Clean the server and sync logs (when using local logs). Regularly updates connector definitions and sweeps old workloads ensuring eventual consenus.
  • Bootloader [airbyte-bootloader]: Upgrade and Migrate the Database tables and confirm the environment is ready to work.

This is a holistic high-level description of each component. For Airbyte deployed in Kubernetes the structure is very similar with a few changes.