What is AWS Glue?

AWS Glue is a fully managed, serverless data integration service from Amazon Web Services that helps teams discover, prepare, move, and integrate data at scale. It sits at the center of modern ETL tools, big data integration, and data cataloging, collapsing the complexity of building and operating pipelines that feed data lakes, data warehouses, and lakehouses. Data engineers, analytics engineers, and machine learning teams use AWS Glue to connect to hundreds of data sources, crawl and catalog metadata, transform data with Apache Spark or Ray, and orchestrate jobs without managing infrastructure. Many large enterprises - including financial institutions like Stifel - rely on AWS Glue as a backbone for their cloud-native data platforms.

Introduced in 2017, AWS Glue has steadily evolved from a Spark-based ETL service into a broad data integration platform. It now includes the AWS Glue Data Catalog for centralized metadata, AWS Glue Studio for visual ETL, AWS Glue DataBrew for low-code data preparation, a Schema Registry for streaming data, and zero-ETL integrations with services like Amazon Redshift and Amazon SageMaker. Recent additions like generative AI-assisted job authoring, native support for Apache Hudi, Iceberg, and Delta Lake, and tight integration with AWS Lake Formation and other analytics services make AWS Glue a core building block for modern, governed data architectures on AWS.