Airflow 129 's core knows nothing about Snowflake, Kafka 129 or Slack 353 . Integrations ship as provider packages (apache-airflow-providers-<name>), released independently, with operators, hooks (connection-aware clients), sensors, triggers and connection types. The community's providers reference listed 108 on 2 October 2026, and third parties publish more on PyPI 2,431 . The official image preinstalls 41, among them:
$ airflow providers list -o plain | awk '{print $1, $NF}'
apache-airflow-providers-amazon 9.36.0
apache-airflow-providers-cncf-kubernetes 10.22.0
apache-airflow-providers-postgres 7.0.2
apache-airflow-providers-standard 1.19.0
...Even BashOperator and PythonOperator now live in the standard provider. Install others with Airflow's constraints file (constraints-3.3.2/constraints-3.13.txt in the apache/airflow repository) so pip 21,050 cannot move Airflow's pins; a --dry-run resolved apache-airflow-providers-apache-kafka to 2.0.0 with confluent-kafka 2.15.1. Prefer a provider to a hand-wrapped client: its hooks read connections (Connections and Hooks).