Data processing using AWS Glue

If you recall our conversations from the last few chapters, we kept bringing up AWS Glue for multiple use cases, including for data catalogs, crawlers, classifiers, and batch ingestion using connectors. Now, we come to Glue ETL, which is the most distinct feature of Glue. Since Glue is a fully managed and serverless service, it excels in data transformation types of tasks, usually undertaken by data engineering personas in an organization. You can create Glue ETL jobs using Spark, Python, or Ray. Spark is a common platform for creating distributed computing-based ETL jobs. Since EMR also provides Spark and Glue also has Spark, in the following table, let’s try to simplify certain scenarios where you would prefer to use one over the other:

EMR typical usage	Glue ETL typical usage
Since EMR alleviates all the infrastructure and operational heavy...