What is AWS Glue?

AWS Glue is a fully managed extract, transform, and load (ETL) service that makes it easy for customers to prepare and load their data for analytics. You can create and run an ETL job with a few clicks in the AWS Management Console. You simply point AWS Glue to your data stored on AWS, and AWS Glue discovers your data and stores the associated metadata (e.g. table definition and schema) in the AWS Glue Data Catalog. Once cataloged, your data is immediately searchable, queryable, and available for ETL. AWS Glue generates the code to execute your data transformations and data loading processes.

AWS Glue generates code that is customizable, reusable, and portable. Once your ETL job is ready, you can schedule it to run on AWS Glue’s fully managed, scale-out Apache Spark environment. AWS Glue provides a flexible scheduler with dependency resolution, job monitoring, and alerting.

AWS Glue is serverless, so there is no infrastructure to buy, set up, or manage. It automatically provisions the environment needed to complete the job, and customers pay only for the compute resources consumed while running ETL jobs. With AWS Glue, data can be available for analytics in minutes.

Benefits

• AWS Glue automates much of the effort in building, maintaining, and running ETL jobs. AWS Glue crawls your data sources, identifies data formats, and suggests schemas and transformations. AWS Glue automatically generates the code to execute your data transformations and loading processes.
• AWS Glue is integrated across a wide range of AWS services. AWS Glue natively supports data stored in Amazon Aurora, Amazon RDS for MySQL, Amazon RDS for Oracle, Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL, Amazon RDS for SQL Server, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon S3, as well as MySQL, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, and PostgreSQL databases in your Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) running on Amazon EC2. AWS Glue provides out-of-the-box integration with Amazon Athena, Amazon EMR, Amazon Redshift Spectrum, and any Apache Hive Metastore-compatible application.
• AWS Glue is serverless. There is no infrastructure to provision or manage. AWS Glue handles provisioning, configuration, and scaling of the resources required to run your ETL jobs on a fully managed, scale-out Apache Spark environment. You pay only for the resources used while your jobs are running.
• AWS Glue generates ETL code that is customizable, reusable, and portable, using familiar technology – Scala, Python, and Apache Spark. You can also import custom readers, writers and transformations into your Glue ETL code. Since the code AWS Glue generates is based on open frameworks, there is no lock-in. You can use it anywhere.

Use Cases

• Analyze Log Data in Your Data Warehouse
  
  Prepare your clickstream or process log data for analytics by cleaning, normalizing, and enriching your data sets using AWS Glue. AWS Glue generates the schema for your semi-structured data, creates ETL code to transform, flatten, and enrich your data, and loads your data warehouse on a recurring basis.
• Unified View of Your Data Across Multiple Data Stores
  
  You can use the AWS Glue Data Catalog to quickly discover and search across multiple AWS data sets without moving the data. Once the data is cataloged, it is immediately available for search and query using Amazon Athena, Amazon EMR, and Amazon Redshift Spectrum.