# What’s Kestra?
Kestra is an orchestration & scheduler platform that helps you to build, run, schedule, and monitor complex pipelines.
Kestra makes it simple to create a flow (opens new window), requiring only a few lines of yaml. All other complexities are handled by Kestra, including:
- Deploying
- Scaling
- Monitoring
- Handling errors
- ...
Simply define the flow with a simple succession of tasks, decide when and how the flow should be launched, and monitor execution in real time.
# Principles
- Simple: Kestra workflows are defined as yaml, no code here, just a simple declarative syntax allowing even complex workflows.
- Extensible: The entire foundation of Kestra is built upon plugins. Find an existing plugin or build your own to fit your business needs.
- Real time: Kestra is built by thinking in real time. Simply create a flow, run it and see all the logs in realtime.
- Scalable: Kestra users enjoy its almost infinite scalability. It is built with top technologies like Kafka & Elasticsearch, and can scale to millions of executions without any difficulty.
- Cloud Native: Built with the cloud in mind, Kestra uses top cloud native technologies and allows to deploy everywhere, whether in the cloud or on-premise.
- Open source: Kestra is built with the Apache 2 license, contribute (opens new window) to our core or plugins as you can.
# Usages
Kestra can be used as:
- Data orchestrator: Handle complex workflows and move large datasets. Extract, transform and load datasets in the manner of your choice (ETL or ELT).
- Distributed crontab: Schedule work on multiple workflows and monitor each and every process.
- Events Driven workflow: React to external events such as api calls to get things done instantly.
- ...
Now get started and keep it flowing!