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AWS Glue

Fully managed extract, transform, and load (ETL) service that makes it easy to prepare and load data for analytics.

Cloud Service
3K+ users
Pay-per-use
Author: Paul Huston
Overview

AWS Glue is a fully managed extract, transform, and load (ETL) service that makes it easy to prepare and load data for analytics. As part of the AWS ecosystem, Glue provides serverless data integration capabilities that automatically scale based on workload demands.

Launched in 2017, AWS Glue eliminates the need to provision and manage infrastructure for ETL jobs. It automatically discovers and catalogs metadata about your data sources, generates ETL code, and provides a visual interface for building data transformation workflows.

Key Features

Serverless ETL

No infrastructure to manage, automatic scaling based on workload

Data Catalog

Centralized metadata repository with automatic schema discovery

Job Scheduling

Built-in scheduler for automating ETL workflows

Auto Scaling

Automatically scales resources up or down based on job requirements

Advantages
  • Serverless architecture eliminates infrastructure management
  • Deep integration with AWS ecosystem
  • Automatic scaling based on workload demands
  • Pay-per-use pricing model
  • Built-in data catalog and schema discovery
Things to be aware of
  • AWS vendor lock-in with limited portability
  • Limited transformation capabilities compared to specialized ETL tools
  • Cold start latency for infrequent jobs
  • Debugging can be challenging in serverless environment
Best For

AWS-Centric Organizations

Companies heavily invested in AWS ecosystem

Serverless Preference

Teams wanting to avoid infrastructure management

Variable Workloads

Applications with unpredictable or sporadic ETL needs

Customer Success Story

Netflix Data Engineering

Media & Entertainment

"AWS Glue enables our content recommendation pipeline by processing viewing data and user preferences at scale across our global platform."

Source: aws.amazon.com