Meltano is an open-source ELT platform built for data integration, designed to help data engineers manage their data pipelines more efficiently. It allows users to extract data from various sources (using Singer taps), load it into destinations (using targets), and transform it with tools like dbt. Meltano provides a command-line interface (CLI) for managing pipelines and supports project versioning, orchestration, and plugin management to ensure a modular and flexible workflow. It's developer-friendly, making it easy to build, test, and deploy data workflows within the software development lifecycle.