AWS Data Pipeline vs AWS Import/Export: What are the differences?

AWS Data Pipeline: Process and move data between different AWS compute and storage services. AWS Data Pipeline is a web service that provides a simple management system for data-driven workflows. Using AWS Data Pipeline, you define a pipeline composed of the “data sources” that contain your data, the “activities” or business logic such as EMR jobs or SQL queries, and the “schedule” on which your business logic executes. For example, you could define a job that, every hour, runs an Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR)–based analysis on that hour’s Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) log data, loads the results into a relational database for future lookup, and then automatically sends you a daily summary email; AWS Import/Export: Transfer your data directly onto and off of storage devices using Amazon’s internal network and bypassing the Internet. Import/Export supports importing and exporting data into and out of Amazon S3 buckets. For significant data sets, AWS Import/Export is often faster than Internet transfer and more cost effective than upgrading your connectivity.

AWS Data Pipeline and AWS Import/Export belong to "Data Transfer" category of the tech stack.

Some of the features offered by AWS Data Pipeline are:

• You can find (and use) a variety of popular AWS Data Pipeline tasks in the AWS Management Console’s template section.
• Hourly analysis of Amazon S3‐based log data
• Daily replication of AmazonDynamoDB data to Amazon S3

On the other hand, AWS Import/Export provides the following key features:

• Data Migration – If you have data you need to upload into the AWS cloud for the first time, AWS Import/Export is often much faster than transferring that data via the Internet.
• Content Distribution – Send data to your customers on portable storage devices.
• Direct Data Interchange – If you regularly receive content on portable storage devices from your business associates, you can have them send it directly to AWS for import into Amazon S3 or Amazon EBS.