Prefect is a modern Python-native orchestration framework designed around two principles: pipelines should be testable locally by calling them as regular Python functions, and orchestration infrastructure should be decoupled from the execution environment. A Prefect flow is a Python function — to run it, you call it. No scheduler, no metadata database, no worker cluster is needed for local development. This zero-infrastructure local execution is Prefect's most significant developer experience advantage over Airflow, where a multi-component stack must be running before a single task can be tested.
A Prefect deployment wraps a flow with the scheduling and runtime metadata needed to run it automatically: when to run (a cron schedule or interval), where to run (a work pool backed by local processes, Docker, or Kubernetes), and with what parameters. Deployments bridge the pure-Python flow definition and the production execution environment. The same flow code can be deployed to dev, staging, and production with different schedules and infrastructure without modifying the flow itself — the deployment configuration changes, the flow code does not.
Analogy🏏Cricket
🏏 Think of it like cricket: Migrating from Airflow to Prefect is like the same bowling coach shifting from traditional Test cricket notation to a modern T20 analytics dashboard — the underlying ball-by-ball data (the business logic) is exactly the same. What changes is how the data is recorded, displayed, and acted upon. The yorker that Bumrah bowls in over 20 is identical whether it is recorded in the old scorebook (Airflow DAG file) or the new analytics platform (Prefect flow). The migration is a transcription exercise, not a strategy change — and a wise coach verifies that the runs, wickets, and economies match exactly between the old and new system before decommissioning the scorebook. That verification step is the whole heart of the migration: because the yorker is unchanged, the only honest test is to run the same over through both systems and confirm the recorded runs, wickets and economies match to the last digit before the old scorebook is thrown away. Rushing to burn the scorebook the moment the shiny dashboard lights up is how teams lose a season of records to a silent transcription slip. The coach keeps both systems running in parallel for a while, reconciles their outputs ball by ball, and only when every figure agrees does he trust the new dashboard alone — a transcription is only complete when you have proven nothing was lost in the copying.
🏏 Showing the Cricket analogy — a Cricket version isn’t available for this concept yet.