What is AWS Glue used for?

AWS Glue is a serverless data integration service from AWS for discovering, preparing and moving data with ETL jobs and a central data catalog. It is a good fit for building ETL pipelines on AWS, cataloging data lake contents, and preparing data for analytics and machine learning.

How much does AWS Glue cost?

AWS Glue is a paid product with no free plan. Usage-based. The Data Catalog is free for the first million objects and requests each month, then $1.00 per 100,000 objects or per million requests. Table optimization, statistics and crawlers cost $0.44 per DPU-hour.

Is AWS Glue open source?

No. AWS Glue is proprietary (closed-source) software and can't be self-hosted. Open-source alternatives to AWS Glue include Airbyte, Mage AI and Duckle.

What are some alternatives to AWS Glue?

AWS Glue competes with Azure Data Factory, Fivetran and Informatica. For open-source options, see Enlisted's ranked list of open-source AWS Glue alternatives.

AWS Glue: features, pricing and alternatives

About AWS Glue

AWS Glue is a serverless data integration service from Amazon Web Services. It is used to find data across a company's AWS storage and databases, prepare it and run extract, transform and load jobs, without provisioning or managing servers for those jobs.

A central part of the service is its data catalog, which records the structure of datasets so that other AWS analytics tools can query them. Glue also provides job authoring for Spark-based transformations, scheduling and workflow features. AWS positions it as a way to discover, prepare, integrate and modernize ETL processes, and it works alongside services such as Amazon EMR, Athena and Redshift.

AWS Glue is proprietary and available only as a managed service inside AWS, so there is no self-hosted edition. It is billed on usage under AWS pricing, and the vendor maintains a dedicated pricing page.

Key features

Serverless ETL job execution
Central data catalog for datasets
Automated data discovery
Spark-based data transformation
Job scheduling and workflows
Integration with AWS analytics services

Good fit for

→Building ETL pipelines on AWS
→Cataloging data lake contents
→Preparing data for analytics and machine learning

Tags: aws; etl; serverless; data-catalog; data-integration; spark; data-pipelines; cloud-service

AWS Glue: questions and answers

What is AWS Glue used for?: AWS Glue is a serverless data integration service from AWS for discovering, preparing and moving data with ETL jobs and a central data catalog. It is a good fit for building ETL pipelines on AWS, cataloging data lake contents, and preparing data for analytics and machine learning.
How much does AWS Glue cost?: AWS Glue is a paid product with no free plan. Usage-based. The Data Catalog is free for the first million objects and requests each month, then $1.00 per 100,000 objects or per million requests. Table optimization, statistics and crawlers cost $0.44 per DPU-hour.
Is AWS Glue open source?: No. AWS Glue is proprietary (closed-source) software and can't be self-hosted. Open-source alternatives to AWS Glue include Airbyte, Mage AI and Duckle.
What are some alternatives to AWS Glue?: AWS Glue competes with Azure Data Factory, Fivetran and Informatica. For open-source options, see Enlisted's ranked list of open-source AWS Glue alternatives.