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AWS Glue vs Apache Spark: What are the differences?

AWS Glue and Apache Spark are both powerful tools used for big data processing and analytics. However, there are key differences between the two:

  1. Data Processing Paradigm: AWS Glue is a fully-managed extract, transform, and load (ETL) service, while Apache Spark is an open-source big data processing framework. Glue provides a serverless environment for data preparation and transformation, with support for various data sources and schedules. Spark, on the other hand, is a distributed computing system that offers in-memory processing and batch/streaming capabilities.

  2. Programming Language Support: AWS Glue primarily uses the Apache PySpark framework, which allows developers to write ETL jobs using Python. It also supports Scala and Java programming languages. Apache Spark, on the other hand, provides APIs for programming in Scala, Java, Python, and R. This makes Spark more flexible and compatible with a wider range of development languages.

  3. Deployment Options: AWS Glue is a managed service provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS), which means it is deployed and maintained within the AWS cloud infrastructure. It offers scalability and high availability without the need for manual setup and management. Apache Spark, being an open-source framework, can be deployed on various platforms including on-premises data centers, public clouds, and hybrid environments. This gives users more control over their deployment and infrastructure choices.

  4. Integration with AWS Services: AWS Glue is well-integrated with other AWS services, such as Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon Athena. This allows users to easily access and process data stored in these services using Glue's ETL capabilities. Apache Spark, while it can also integrate with AWS services, provides more flexibility in terms of integration options and supports a wider range of data sources and connectors.

  5. Scalability and Performance: AWS Glue provides automatic scaling capabilities, allowing the service to handle large datasets and high workloads without manual intervention. It leverages AWS's infrastructure to distribute the processing load efficiently and achieve high performance. Apache Spark, being a distributed computing system, also scales horizontally by adding more nodes to the cluster. It provides in-memory processing, which can significantly improve performance for iterative algorithms and complex analytics tasks.

  6. Cost: AWS Glue follows a pay-as-you-go pricing model, where users pay for the resources consumed while running their ETL jobs. This can be cost-effective for small to medium-scale workloads. Apache Spark, being an open-source framework, is free to use. However, users need to consider the cost of infrastructure and maintenance when deploying and managing Spark clusters.

In summary, AWS Glue is a fully-managed ETL service provided by AWS, while Apache Spark is an open-source big data processing framework. Glue offers a serverless ETL environment with good integration with AWS services, while Spark provides more flexibility in terms of programming languages, deployment options, and data sources. The choice between Glue and Spark depends on specific requirements, preferences, and existing infrastructure.

Advice on AWS Glue and Apache Spark

We need to perform ETL from several databases into a data warehouse or data lake. We want to

  • keep raw and transformed data available to users to draft their own queries efficiently
  • give users the ability to give custom permissions and SSO
  • move between open-source on-premises development and cloud-based production environments

We want to use inexpensive Amazon EC2 instances only on medium-sized data set 16GB to 32GB feeding into Tableau Server or PowerBI for reporting and data analysis purposes.

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Replies (3)
John Nguyen
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AirflowAirflowAWS LambdaAWS Lambda

You could also use AWS Lambda and use Cloudwatch event schedule if you know when the function should be triggered. The benefit is that you could use any language and use the respective database client.

But if you orchestrate ETLs then it makes sense to use Apache Airflow. This requires Python knowledge.

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AirflowAirflow

Though we have always built something custom, Apache airflow (https://airflow.apache.org/) stood out as a key contender/alternative when it comes to open sources. On the commercial offering, Amazon Redshift combined with Amazon Kinesis (for complex manipulations) is great for BI, though Redshift as such is expensive.

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Recommends

You may want to look into a Data Virtualization product called Conduit. It connects to disparate data sources in AWS, on prem, Azure, GCP, and exposes them as a single unified Spark SQL view to PowerBI (direct query) or Tableau. Allows auto query and caching policies to enhance query speeds and experience. Has a GPU query engine and optimized Spark for fallback. Can be deployed on your AWS VM or on prem, scales up and out. Sounds like the ideal solution to your needs.

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Nilesh Akhade
Technical Architect at Self Employed · | 5 upvotes · 516.5K views

We have a Kafka topic having events of type A and type B. We need to perform an inner join on both type of events using some common field (primary-key). The joined events to be inserted in Elasticsearch.

In usual cases, type A and type B events (with same key) observed to be close upto 15 minutes. But in some cases they may be far from each other, lets say 6 hours. Sometimes event of either of the types never come.

In all cases, we should be able to find joined events instantly after they are joined and not-joined events within 15 minutes.

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Replies (2)
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ElasticsearchElasticsearch

The first solution that came to me is to use upsert to update ElasticSearch:

  1. Use the primary-key as ES document id
  2. Upsert the records to ES as soon as you receive them. As you are using upsert, the 2nd record of the same primary-key will not overwrite the 1st one, but will be merged with it.

Cons: The load on ES will be higher, due to upsert.

To use Flink:

  1. Create a KeyedDataStream by the primary-key
  2. In the ProcessFunction, save the first record in a State. At the same time, create a Timer for 15 minutes in the future
  3. When the 2nd record comes, read the 1st record from the State, merge those two, and send out the result, and clear the State and the Timer if it has not fired
  4. When the Timer fires, read the 1st record from the State and send out as the output record.
  5. Have a 2nd Timer of 6 hours (or more) if you are not using Windowing to clean up the State

Pro: if you have already having Flink ingesting this stream. Otherwise, I would just go with the 1st solution.

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Akshaya Rawat
Senior Specialist Platform at Publicis Sapient · | 3 upvotes · 361.2K views
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Apache SparkApache Spark

Please refer "Structured Streaming" feature of Spark. Refer "Stream - Stream Join" at https://spark.apache.org/docs/latest/structured-streaming-programming-guide.html#stream-stream-joins . In short you need to specify "Define watermark delays on both inputs" and "Define a constraint on time across the two inputs"

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Vamshi Krishna
Data Engineer at Tata Consultancy Services · | 4 upvotes · 241.2K views

I have to collect different data from multiple sources and store them in a single cloud location. Then perform cleaning and transforming using PySpark, and push the end results to other applications like reporting tools, etc. What would be the best solution? I can only think of Azure Data Factory + Databricks. Are there any alternatives to #AWS services + Databricks?

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Hi all,

Currently, we need to ingest the data from Amazon S3 to DB either Amazon Athena or Amazon Redshift. But the problem with the data is, it is in .PSV (pipe separated values) format and the size is also above 200 GB. The query performance of the timeout in Athena/Redshift is not up to the mark, too slow while compared to Google BigQuery. How would I optimize the performance and query result time? Can anyone please help me out?

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Replies (4)

you can use aws glue service to convert you pipe format data to parquet format , and thus you can achieve data compression . Now you should choose Redshift to copy your data as it is very huge. To manage your data, you should partition your data in S3 bucket and also divide your data across the redshift cluster

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Carlos Acedo
Data Technologies Manager at SDG Group Iberia · | 5 upvotes · 232.8K views
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Amazon RedshiftAmazon Redshift

First of all you should make your choice upon Redshift or Athena based on your use case since they are two very diferent services - Redshift is an enterprise-grade MPP Data Warehouse while Athena is a SQL layer on top of S3 with limited performance. If performance is a key factor, users are going to execute unpredictable queries and direct and managing costs are not a problem I'd definitely go for Redshift. If performance is not so critical and queries will be predictable somewhat I'd go for Athena.

Once you select the technology you'll need to optimize your data in order to get the queries executed as fast as possible. In both cases you may need to adapt the data model to fit your queries better. In the case you go for Athena you'd also proabably need to change your file format to Parquet or Avro and review your partition strategy depending on your most frequent type of query. If you choose Redshift you'll need to ingest the data from your files into it and maybe carry out some tuning tasks for performance gain.

I'll recommend Redshift for now since it can address a wider range of use cases, but we could give you better advice if you described your use case in depth.

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Alexis Blandin
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Amazon AthenaAmazon Athena

It depend of the nature of your data (structured or not?) and of course your queries (ad-hoc or predictible?). For example you can look at partitioning and columnar format to maximize MPP capabilities for both Athena and Redshift

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Recommends

you can change your PSV fomat data to parquet file format with AWS GLUE and then your query performance will be improved

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Pros of AWS Glue
Pros of Apache Spark
  • 9
    Managed Hive Metastore
  • 61
    Open-source
  • 48
    Fast and Flexible
  • 8
    One platform for every big data problem
  • 8
    Great for distributed SQL like applications
  • 6
    Easy to install and to use
  • 3
    Works well for most Datascience usecases
  • 2
    Interactive Query
  • 2
    Machine learning libratimery, Streaming in real
  • 2
    In memory Computation

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Cons of AWS Glue
Cons of Apache Spark
    Be the first to leave a con
    • 4
      Speed

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    - No public GitHub repository available -

    What is AWS Glue?

    A fully managed extract, transform, and load (ETL) service that makes it easy for customers to prepare and load their data for analytics.

    What is Apache Spark?

    Spark is a fast and general processing engine compatible with Hadoop data. It can run in Hadoop clusters through YARN or Spark's standalone mode, and it can process data in HDFS, HBase, Cassandra, Hive, and any Hadoop InputFormat. It is designed to perform both batch processing (similar to MapReduce) and new workloads like streaming, interactive queries, and machine learning.

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    What are some alternatives to AWS Glue and Apache Spark?
    AWS Data Pipeline
    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.
    Airflow
    Use Airflow to author workflows as directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) of tasks. The Airflow scheduler executes your tasks on an array of workers while following the specified dependencies. Rich command lines utilities makes performing complex surgeries on DAGs a snap. The rich user interface makes it easy to visualize pipelines running in production, monitor progress and troubleshoot issues when needed.
    Talend
    It is an open source software integration platform helps you in effortlessly turning data into business insights. It uses native code generation that lets you run your data pipelines seamlessly across all cloud providers and get optimized performance on all platforms.
    Alooma
    Get the power of big data in minutes with Alooma and Amazon Redshift. Simply build your pipelines and map your events using Alooma’s friendly mapping interface. Query, analyze, visualize, and predict now.
    Databricks
    Databricks Unified Analytics Platform, from the original creators of Apache Spark™, unifies data science and engineering across the Machine Learning lifecycle from data preparation to experimentation and deployment of ML applications.
    See all alternatives