Prefect is a workflow orchestration platform designed with a Python-first philosophy: pipelines are defined entirely in Python code using simple decorators (@flow, @task), without the DAG boilerplate required by Airflow. Prefect 2.x (released 2022) introduced a redesigned architecture with Prefect Cloud as the control plane and Prefect Workers running in customer infrastructure, making it well-suited for hybrid and cloud-native lakehouse deployments.
Prefect in Iceberg Lakehouse Pipelines
Prefect flows can orchestrate any Python-executable operation, making them flexible for Iceberg lakehouse pipelines: calling the Spark REST API to submit an ingestion job, invoking dbt programmatically, running PyIceberg scripts to manage table snapshots, or triggering Iceberg maintenance procedures. Prefect's built-in retry logic, state persistence, and alerting integrations (Slack, PagerDuty) provide production-grade reliability without extensive custom error handling code.
