How Riverside Connected dbt Cloud, Snowflake, and Hightouch Into a Single Dependency-Aware Pipeline

Riverside is a podcast recording and editing platform used by creators and media teams worldwide. Their analytics engineering team runs the company's internal data operations — ELT ingestion into Snowflake, sequential dbt Cloud transformation jobs, Metaplane data quality checks, and Hightouch reverse ETL to downstream platforms. Six tools in total, all with dependencies on each other, all previously running on isolated time-based schedules with no actual handoff between them. The team evaluated Astronomer, Dagster, Mage, and Orchestra. All four were rejected. Airflow was too complex for a team of SQL and YAML practitioners. Dagster required too steep a learning curve. Orchestra abstracted too much away. They chose Kestra Cloud and connected their full analytics stack without rewriting a single pipeline.

"Simply powerful yet simple enough."