Artifacts#

Union produces a large number of intermediate outputs when running tasks and workflows. These outputs are stored internally in Union and are accessible through the relevant executions, but are not usually directly accessible to users.

The Artifact Service indexes and adds semantic meaning to outputs of all Union task and workflow executions, such as models, files, or any other kinds of data, enabling you to directly access, track, and orchestrate pipelines through the outputs themselves. Artifacts allow you to store additional metadata for these outputs in the form of partitions, which are key-value pairs that describe the artifact and which can be used to query the Artifact Service to locate artifacts. Artifacts allow for loose coupling of workflows—for example, a downstream workflow can be configured to consume the latest result of an upstream workflow. With this higher-order abstraction, Union aims to ease collaboration across teams, provide for reactivity and automation, and give you a broader view of how artifacts move across executions.

Versioning#

Artifacts are uniquely identified and versioned by the following information:

  • Project

  • Domain

  • Artifact name

  • Artifact version

You can set an artifact’s name in code when you declare the artifact and the artifact version is automatically generated when the artifact is materialized as part of any task or workflow execution that emits an artifact with this name. Any execution of a task or workflow that emits an artifact creates a new version of that artifact.

Partitions#

When you declare an artifact, you can define partitions for it that enable semantic grouping of artifacts. Partitions are metadata that take the form of key-value pairs, with the keys defined at registration time and the values supplied at runtime. You can specify up to 10 partition keys for an artifact. You can set an optional partition called time_partition to capture information about the execution timestamp to your desired level of granularity. For more information, see Declaring artifacts.

Note

The time_partition partition is not enabled by default. To enable it, set time_partitioned=True in the artifact declaration. For more information, see the time-partitioned artifact example.

Queries#

To consume an artifact in a workflow, you can define a query containing the artifact’s name as well as any required partition values. You then supply the query as an input value to the workflow definition. At execution time, the query will return the most recent version of the artifact that meets the criteria by default. You can also query for a specific artifact version.

For more information on querying for and consuming artifacts in workflows, see Consuming artifacts in workflows.

To query for artifacts programmatically in a Python script using UnionRemote, see UnionRemote.

UnionRemote vs FlyteRemote

UnionRemote is identical to FlyteRemote, with additional functionality to handle artifacts. You cannot interact with artifacts using FlyteRemote.

Lineage#

Once an artifact is materialized, its lineage is visible in the UI. For more information, see Artifact view.