Context

At Wayfair (they've got what you need!) from 2015-2020, I led teams that both built and leveraged Kronos, a generalized orchestration engine for data warehouses. The engine ended up having quite significant adoption, though it was too tightly coupled to Wayfair technology to be a viable open-source option. Post Wayfair, I realized that though I had a good sense of how Kronos fit into the broader landscape of data orchestration tools - of the time Oozie, Airflow, Luigi, SSIS, and more - and the tools of the future - DBT, etc - there were many who probably ran into it as a weird internal elephant. This post is intended to be a map of where it fit into the overall landscape of data tooling at the time, and how tools like DBT evolved past it.