dbt Seattle Meetup: Adventures scaling dbt Core

In August 2023 I spoke at Seattle's dbt Meetup about my and LaunchDarkly's accumulated battle scars running dbt Core and Apache Airflow in production. I walked through our experience from:

1. Not using an orchestrator at all
2. Using Apache Airflow + dbt Core wrong
3. A hacky middle ground
4. Eventually, a containerized workflow using ECS Fargate tasks. As of May 2026, that Airflow + ECS + dbt architecture is still in use by a few teams today.

This talk was not recorded, but you can view the slides here.