At the Airflow Summit 2024, Bhavesh Jaisinghani, Data Engineering Manager at Autodesk, shared how his team transformed testing of their data pipelines by creating a secure production-like UAT environment with Astronomer and Apache Airflow. This setup enabled seamless testing of Spark-based workflows, reduced development cycles, and ensured data security for sensitive PII. Autodesk's data platform consists of four primary layers: ingestion, transformation, data warehousing, and BI / reporting, relying heavily on Apache Spark for data processing. The company implemented a UAT environment mirroring production, featuring separate infrastructure, granular access control, data sync utilities, and CI/CD integration. This setup delivered impressive results, including improved data quality by 90%, reduced development cycles by 33%, and technical debt reduction. Autodesk's innovative approach powered by Astronomer and Airflow showcases how secure, scalable UAT environments enable faster, more reliable pipeline development.