# How-to Guides

Setting up the sandbox in the Quick Start section was easy; building a production-grade environment requires a bit more work!

These how-to guides will step you through common tasks in using and configuring an Airflow environment.

- Setting Configuration Options
- Initializing a Database Backend
- Using Operators
  - BashOperator
  - PythonOperator
  - Google Cloud Platform Operators
- Managing Connections
  - Creating a Connection with the UI
  - Editing a Connection with the UI
  - Creating a Connection with Environment Variables
  - Connection Types
- Securing Connections
- Writing Logs
  - Writing Logs Locally
  - Writing Logs to Amazon S3
  - Writing Logs to Azure Blob Storage
  - Writing Logs to Google Cloud Storage
- Scaling Out with Celery
- Scaling Out with Dask
- Scaling Out with Mesos (community contributed)
  - Tasks executed directly on mesos slaves
  - Tasks executed in containers on mesos slaves
- Running Airflow with systemd
- Running Airflow with upstart
- Using the Test Mode Configuration