Smile officially announces its partnership with Kestra, the leading open-source declarative orchestration platform. This alliance combines Kestra’s event-driven, Workflow-as-Code (YAML) orchestration power with Smile’s expertise in Data engineering, open-source infrastructure integration, and Cloud & AI solution deployments.
Together, Smile and Kestra empower IT and Data leaders to streamline process automation, eliminate application silos, and manage end-to-end data pipelines.
Why combine Smile’s expertise with the Kestra platform?
As IT architectures grow increasingly complex, orchestration has become a mission-critical component. The partnership between Smile and Kestra delivers a modern response to corporate agility and sovereignty challenges:
- Declarative & Versatile Orchestration (Data, Infra, Apps): With Kestra, workflows are defined in YAML just like code—version-controlled, reviewed, and deployed. Tasks execute in the language of your choice (Python, Go, Node.js, Java, Shell, etc.). Data, IT, and software engineering teams work from a unified foundation, streamlining pipeline maintenance and reducing technical debt.
- Scalability & Sovereignty: Kestra deploys seamlessly on both Docker and Kubernetes. Its architecture decouples workflow management from task execution, allowing workers to scale independently and run directly where your data resides—whether in another region, a different cloud provider, on-premises, or in air-gapped environments. Its open-source core guarantees technological independence.
- Observability & Security: Every execution is monitored in real time (topologies, logs, metrics, Prometheus and Grafana integrations) with automated retry mechanisms on failure. The Enterprise Edition adds SSO, fine-grained role-based access control (RBAC), audit trails, and multi-tenancy to satisfy large enterprise requirements.
The benefits of partnering with an expert Kestra integrator
Relying on Smile to deploy or migrate to Kestra ensures:
- Comprehensive IT Ecosystem Mastery: Kestra features an extensive catalog of over 2,400 plugins to connect databases, cloud platforms, data warehouses (Snowflake, BigQuery), and business applications without custom code. Smile guides you in selecting, integrating, and securing the right components.
- Accelerated AI Use Cases: Kestra orchestrates data and machine learning pipelines (data prep, model training, deployment) and goes a step further by embedding AI agents directly within workflows. Any workflow can also be exposed as a tool for your AI agents to call, fully compliant with governance and traceability policies.
From concept to operational reality
Between tool proliferation and the push to deliver concrete AI solutions without overloading IT systems, data initiatives demand pragmatic choices. The challenge goes well beyond simple batch processing: it requires automating business processes in real time (triggered by events, webhooks, or messages), providing full visibility across teams, and securing production workflows—including automated incident handling when a job fails.
This is precisely the core value of the partnership: merging Kestra’s technological agility with Smile’s end-to-end engineering vision to turn architectural complexity into operational performance.
"Orchestration has become the core engine of modern IT and Data architectures. By partnering with Kestra, we provide our clients with an open-source, event-driven, declarative solution that automates complex workflows in just a few lines of YAML—all while ensuring end-to-end observability."
Jamel Ben Amar, Data & IA CTO at Smile
About Smile
As the European leader in open-source digital technologies, Smile Group has been supporting enterprise digital transformation for over 30 years. With 1,700 employees across 9 countries, the group leverages its complementary expert brands (Smile, neopixl, SensioLabs, UX-Republic, Alter Way, Synotis, creativestyle) to build bespoke solutions ranging from digital experience to Cloud, Data, and AI.
Learn more: www.smile.eu
About Kestra
Kestra is an open-source, declarative orchestration platform designed to simplify the creation, execution, and monitoring of complex workflows. Through its Workflow-as-Code (YAML) approach and rich plugin ecosystem, Kestra allows Data, IT, and software teams to automate both data pipelines and infrastructure operations.
Learn more: kestra.io
