AWS Glue
Free tier availableServerless data integration service on AWS
📖 Overview
AWS Glue is a serverless data integration service that makes it easy to discover, prepare, and combine data for analytics and ML. It includes a data catalog, ETL engine (Spark-based), and crawlers for automatic schema discovery.
✨ Key Features
- ✓ Serverless: No infrastructure to manage
- ✓ Data Catalog: Centralized metadata repository
- ✓ Crawlers: Auto-discover schemas
- ✓ Visual ETL: Low-code job authoring
- ✓ Spark Engine: Scalable processing
- ✓ Job Bookmarks: Incremental processing
💰 Pricing
Model
paid
Starting Price
$0.44/DPU-hour
✓ Free tier available
🏢 Enterprise plans available
👍 Pros
- + Deep AWS integration
- + Serverless scaling
- + Data Catalog is useful standalone
- + Visual editor for simple jobs
- + Pay only for compute used
👎 Cons
- − Can be expensive at scale
- − Cold start latency
- − Limited to Spark/Python
- − Complex pricing model
- − Debugging can be painful
🎯 Best For
AWS-native organizations needing serverless ETL. Good for teams without dedicated data engineers who need basic data integration.
🔗 Works With
📁 More ETL/ELT Tools
Airbyte
Open-source data integration platform for ELT pipelines
Azure Data Factory
Cloud-scale data integration service on Azure
Fivetran
Automated data integration that just works
Hevo Data
No-code data pipeline platform