Building a data pipeline is easy. Building one that automatically recovers from failures, maintains data integrity during outages, and runs reliably in production—that's what separates junior engineers from platform architects.
This course teaches you to design self-healing pipelines with automated recovery, fault tolerance, and disaster recovery built in from day one. You'll learn to build and schedule streaming workflows using modern orchestrators like Airflow and Prefect, implement reliability patterns including idempotence, checkpointing, and dead-letter queues for exactly-once-ish processing, and design multi-region recovery strategies that keep data flowing during regional failures.
Through hands-on labs and real-world examples from Airbnb, LinkedIn, Netflix, and Uber, you'll master the orchestration and recovery techniques that turn fragile scripts into production-grade infrastructure. Learn to handle automated retries, run safe backfills, implement checkpoint-based recovery, and execute disaster recovery playbooks that restore pipelines after outages.
Engineers who build or maintain real-time data pipelines and need stronger orchestration, reliability, and recovery skills.
Basics of Python & SQL, Linux CLI, and Kafka fundamentals. Cloud account helpful but optional.
By the end of the course, learners will be able to design, orchestrate, and recover real-time data pipelines that run reliably at production scale.
Learners set up a modern orchestrator and build a first DAG/flow that runs reliably. We cover scheduling, retries, task dependencies, and lightweight observability. By the end, learners will ship a minimal but production-aware pipeline.
We move from “works on my machine” to “recovers on its own.” Learners add exactly-once-ish processing, checkpointing, schema controls, and dead-letter queues. The module emphasizes designing for replay and safe backfills.
Learners design for failure domains—task, job, cluster, and region. We cover backfills vs. reprocessing, Delta time travel for safe fixes, and Kafka replication patterns (MirrorMaker 2, uReplicator) for DR.
Coursera brings together a diverse network of subject matter experts who have demonstrated their expertise through professional industry experience or strong academic backgrounds. These instructors design and teach courses that make practical, career-relevant skills accessible to learners worldwide.
What is pipeline orchestration and recovery in this course?
It means designing a real-time data pipeline as a coordinated workflow that can schedule work, manage dependencies, and recover cleanly when something fails. The course focuses on making pipelines reliable over time, not just getting a script or job to run once.
When would you use this kind of workflow orchestration?
You would use it when a pipeline needs to run repeatedly, stay observable, and keep data moving even when tasks fail, records are bad, or a dependency becomes unstable. In this course, it is used for real-time and batch-adjacent workflows that need safe retries, replays, and recovery paths.
How does orchestration and recovery fit into a broader workflow?
It sits between writing the logic for individual pipeline steps and running the whole system reliably over time. In this course, that layer turns separate tasks into a repeatable process you can schedule, monitor, backfill, and restore.
How is an orchestrated, recoverable pipeline different from running separate jobs manually?
Manual jobs mainly rely on separate reruns and human judgment, while an orchestrated, recoverable pipeline has defined dependencies, retries, and recovery paths. The course emphasizes coordinated execution and controlled recovery rather than ad hoc fixes after something breaks.
Do you need any prerequisites before learning pipeline orchestration and recovery?
A basic understanding of Python, SQL, the Linux command line, and Kafka fundamentals is helpful before starting this course. Because it is intermediate, it assumes you can follow how tasks, state, and data movement behave in a real pipeline.
What tools, platforms, or methods are used in this course?
The course uses modern workflow orchestrators such as Airflow and Prefect, along with recovery methods like checkpointing and dead-letter queues.
What specific tasks will you practice or complete in this course?
You practice building scheduled workflows with dependencies and retries, and using logs or alerts to investigate failures. You also work on recovery tasks such as restarting from checkpoints, handling bad records safely, and running controlled backfills or failover steps.