Examining the options for orchestrating pipelines in AWS

As you will have noticed throughout this book, AWS offers many different building blocks for architecting solutions. When it comes to pipeline orchestration, AWS provides native serverless orchestration engines with AWS Data Pipeline and AWS Step Functions, a managed open-source project with Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow (MWAA), and service-specific orchestration with AWS Glue workflows.

There are pros and cons to using each of these solutions, depending on your use case. When making a decision on this, there are multiple factors to consider, such as the level of management effort, the ease of integration with your target ETL engine, logging, error-handling mechanisms, cost, and platform independence.

In this section, we’ll examine each of the four pipeline orchestration options.

AWS Data Pipeline (now in maintenance mode)

AWS Data Pipeline is one of the oldest services that AWS has for creating...