Prefect is an open-source orchestration framework that turns ordinary Python functions into resilient, observable workflows by wrapping them with simple @flow and @task decorators rather than forcing developers into a rigid DAG-authoring language. It automatically handles retries, caching, scheduling, and failure recovery, and every run's state and logs can be tracked through a self-hosted Prefect server or the managed Prefect Cloud dashboard. Deployments can execute on Kubernetes, serverless platforms, or plain VMs, and the same code runs unchanged whether triggered by a cron schedule, a webhook, or an event-based automation. Prefect Technologies open-sourced the engine under the Apache 2.0 license in 2019, and the company has continued expanding the ecosystem since, including its 2026 acquisition of fellow orchestration project Dagster Labs.