The Meta Layer

Concepts: paDagOrchestration, paMonitoring, paDataQuality

The meta layer isn't just 'use Airflow for orchestration and add some data quality checks.' The meta layer is the difference between a pipeline and a platform. You're designing orchestration that handles cross-pipeline dependencies, quality frameworks that prevent bad data from ever reaching consumers, and cost monitoring that catches $50K/month runaway queries before they hit the bill. Cross-Pipeline Orchestration Real platforms have hundreds of DAGs with cross-DAG dependencies. The marketing pipeline depends on the user identity pipeline, which depends on the CDC ingestion pipeline. Airflow's ExternalTaskSensor handles this, but it creates tight coupling: if the upstream DAG changes its schedule, all downstream sensors break. The better pattern is event-driven orchestration: the upstream