AWS Glue Reviews

In my company, we use AWS Glue to build data engineering pipelines, so we ingest data from either S3 or other sources and put it back into Redshift, where we have a data lake or data warehouse.

With AWS Glue, there have been a lot of updates over the past couple of years. The feature which I like the most is that AWS Glue has now integrated Jupyter Notebook into it, causing AWS Glue to become interactive and develop new use cases. The fact that we don't have to worry about the resources required for any particular job since it gets taken care of by AWS Glue adds to the valuable feature set of the product.

AWS Glue Studio has undergone a lot of enhancements in the last couple of months. An improvement that can help the solution is if the user interface can become more user-friendly and allow for features like drag and drop, allowing it to build transformations. There can be a good improvement if the product itself supports different kinds of transformations so that the pipeline, which we want to create, can be done easily since right now, we have to write a code to do so in our company. Only people who can code, either in Java or Python, can use the product freely. Those who don't know Java or Python might find using AWS Glue difficult.

AWS has pricing for spot instances that reduces the cost substantially, but that is not available for AWS Glue AWS pricing for spot instances comes for products like EC2, and if the same gets introduced for AWS Glue, then the pricing can substantially reduce.

I have been using AWS Glue for five years. I am an end user of the product.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

It is a very scalable solution. In our company, we don't have to bother about the latest features implemented by the solution since the solution itself allocates resources, causing the product to scale up or down as the job progresses.

The solution's technical support is good. Whenever we raise a use case where we face an issue in our company, we get a response from the solution's technical team.

AWS Glue is a platform as a service from AWS, so there is no setup required. It's very simple since you can just go into the UI and start using it.

The solution is deployed on a private cloud.

I am a part of the development team, which doesn't have access to all the different sets of features and has a different backup. There is a team that does the initial setup, user access, and all those things. Once the product is ready, my team takes it over, so the setup is done by someone else.

I rate the product's pricing a five on a scale of one to ten, where one is a high price, and ten is a low price.

AWS Glue can be compared to the database provided by Azure which has a lot of extra features or capabilities compared to AWS Glue which is only useful for processing.

I rate the overall product an eight out of ten.

I have been working as a data engineer, where dealing with the ETL process is essential. We are using AWS Glue as a primary ETL tool to serve our organization's needs. I have implemented several Glue jobs still in production.

AWS Glue has enabled us to perform ETL processes efficiently, with ease of use for AWS cloud users, providing a serverless service that eliminates the need for infrastructure maintenance.

The two features I find most valuable in AWS Glue are its user interface and ease of use. The user interface is intuitive, and navigating through the Glue console is seamless. 

Additionally, its ability to integrate with other AWS services is excellent, providing flawless coordination with services such as SNS, S3, and Lambda.

I see scope for improvement in the drag-and-drop feature of AWS Glue. Beginners need additional support as it currently lacks some features required for complex transformations, often necessitating custom Python coding.

I have been using Glue for more than five years now.

Overall, the stability of AWS Glue is excellent. I would rate it a nine out of ten. Some network-related issues may arise. That said, they are rare and do not affect its functionality significantly.

Regarding scalability, AWS Glue is nearly perfect. I would rate it a nine out of ten, although there is always room for improvement.

AWS customer service is great, but there is room for improvement. The issue I face is the inconsistency in dealing with different customer service representatives for the same issue, which disrupts personal touch.

Neutral

On an organizational level, the pricing of AWS Glue does not pose a concern. It is in line with other ETL tools in the market. However, AWS Glue's cost to free-tier users is an issue because it is not entirely free, even for trial purposes.

I advise potential users to adopt AWS Glue primarily due to its user-friendly interface, extensive documentation, and seamless integration with other AWS services, making it ideal for data engineers.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

AWS Glue is fast and managed by AWS. Hence, you don't have to worry about capacity and the performance of Glue jobs. It has integrations with other data stores of AWS. The product offers metadata management, logging, and ETL processing capabilities. It comes with a powerful feature, Glue Studio, which helps to do queries interactively within the community. It is a managed service and very secure. Another popular and mature service is S3. 

I have encountered challenges with multi-region support. 

AWS Glue has standard procedures for tech support. 

Positive

AWS Glue is very user-friendly. However, if you are not a UI person, you can do IaaS. AWS provides a cloud automation service and a service catalog. 

I rate the tool's pricing a four out of ten. 

I rate AWS Glue an eight out of ten. 

We use AWS Glue for ETL batch processing purposes.

The product has a valuable feature for data catalog.

The product is expensive for data streaming compared to EMR. This area needs improvement.

We have been using AWS Glue for one and a half years.

I rate the product's stability a ten out of ten.

We have five to six AWS Glue users. I rate its scalability a nine out of ten.

We have used Cloudera before. We switched to AWS Glue for better pricing, scalability, and innovation.

The initial setup is easy. I rate the process an eight or nine out of ten. It could be deployed on-premises and on the cloud as well. We have a team of five executives to carry out the implementation.

It is an expensive product. I rate its pricing a nine out of ten.

I rate AWS Glue a nine out of ten.

We use the solution to do the usual type of transformations that before required ETL. It's mostly transformation-type purposes that we have, including transforming data from source to target. Also, we are replacing the usual ETLs with Glue, for example.

The solution has helped the organization mostly with migration. When we migrate from mostly on-premises to the cloud, Glue replaces a more expensive item that's also available in the cloud. Lots of programmers can understand Glue because they can write scripts in Python and PySpark, and there are quite a few programmers that know how to program in those languages. With the previous components that did similar things on-premise, you needed specialized knowledge.

The fact that we can use PySpark to program them is great. 

It's fairly straightforward as a product; it's not very complicated. 

The fact that Amazon offers it and it's a quick way of getting things done, and the fact that it doesn't require a lot of training is very positive attributes.

The initial setup is straightforward.  

It can scale.

The mapping area and the use of the data catalog from Glue could be better. I would say those two are the main things we'd like to see improvements on.

The solution needs support for big data.

As I understand it, Glue is based on Lambdas and Lambdas have some limitations as far as running them continuously. Sometimes they get dropped, and they have to be reinitialized.

I've been using the solution for about two years. 

So far, the solution has been stable. For everything that we've done, we didn't run into any problems, so it was fairly stable for us.

The solution can scale. I don't know exactly at what scale. I was using it for a medium-scale type solution. We never tested it with extremely large scales, so I don't know how expansive it can be. That said, since it's in the cloud, if you need more scale, it would be easy enough to add additional Glue components. At least, in theory, it should be fairly scalable.

Indirectly, we have hundreds of people on the solution. 

At this time, I'm not sure if any clients plan to increase usage. 

Since the solution is so easy to use, we have not needed the help of technical support. 

We've previously used many different solutions, including Informatica, Data Storage from IBM, and SSIS.

The solution is easy to set up. It's not overly complex.

At a minimum, a company would need one to two people to handle the deployment. If it is a larger scale of deployment, they might need more personnel. 

As a consultant, I assist with the implementation. 

Likely, a company would receive an ROI as it's cheaper than the alternatives.

I was not involved in the cost negotiation process. 

Our clients typically have chosen Glue from the start. I was not involved in the evaluation process. 

We are using one of the latest versions of the solution. It's about two years old. 

Depending on the number of data sources, the variety of data sources, and the variety of targets they will have, I might recommend the solution. What they have and plan to do will dictate whether Glue is a good solution or whether they would require something more sophisticated - such as Databricks. For example, if you have big data, then Databricks is probably a better solution to do ETL.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. 

We used AWS Glue to build our data warehouse. We built prototypes to go all the way all across their warehouse platforms. From AWS Glue to Spreadsheets and then QuickSight, that's how we're building their warehouse.

I like that it's flexible, powerful, and allows you to write your own queries and scripts to get the needed transformations.

It would be better if it were more user-friendly. The interesting thing we found is that it was a little strange at the beginning. The way Glue works is not very straightforward. After trying different things, for example, we used just the console to create jobs. Then we realized that things were not working as expected. After researching and learning more, we realized that even though the console creates the script for the ETL processes, you need to modify or write your own script in Spark to do everything you want it to do.

For example, we are pulling data from our source database and our application database, which is in Aurora. From there, we are doing the ETL to transform the data and write the results into Redshift. But what was surprising is that it's almost like whatever you want to do, you can do it with Glue because you have the option to put together your own script. Even though there are many functionalities and many connections, you have the opportunity to write your own queries to do whatever transformations you need to do.

It's a little deceiving that some options are supposed to work in a certain way when you set them up in the console, but then they are not exactly working the right way or not as expected. It would be better if they provided more examples and more documentation on options.

I have been using AWS Glue since last year.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give AWS Glue a nine.

One common use case is migrating data from one system to another.  So, mostly migrating data and data engineering, getting real-time or near-real-time data using Lambda functions and migrating big data from on-prem to the cloud for historical data before starting a project.

If you have the Fund Manager, you could use a fast processing engine, which is crucial for performance. 

I also like that you can add custom libraries like JAR files and use them. So, the ability to use a fast processing engine and embed basic jobs easily are significant advantages.

One area that could be improved is the ETL view. The drag-and-drop interface is not as user-friendly as some other ETL tools. 

Additionally, AWS Glue can sometimes be slow, especially when processing large datasets. It was sometimes a bit slow. Also, I couldn't directly use bucketed data. With Elastic Glue, you had to convert your data frames into the correct format before connecting them using the drag-and-drop interface. So that's something I didn't like because the conversion process wasn't straightforward. 

In future releases, I would like to see a feature that could trigger Glue pipeline using an API or something. 

I have experience with AWS Glue. I have about one year of experience in a professional setting, but I have also done some personal work with this solution.

Support was good, but I was working with a big client, so that might have influenced the experience. The response time was fast, we heard back from them within a day. 

Positive

I would rate my experience with the initial setup an eight out of ten, where one is difficult and ten is easy. 

The initial setup is not very complex. You can customize parameters like minimum and maximum for your needs. For me, it wasn't complex to deploy the solution. 

I'd rate it around six out of ten compared to other tools like Databricks.  

We use AWS Glue for data analytics.

AWS Glue is a stable and easy-to-use solution.

The solution’s stability could be improved.

I have been using AWS Glue for the last three years.

I rate AWS Glue a seven out of ten for stability.

AWS Glue is a very scalable solution, and you can connect multiple databases.

AWS Glue's technical support is very good.

AWS Glue is not a licensed solution. AWS Glue follows a pay-as-you-go model, wherein the cost of the data you use will be counted as a monthly bill.

Currently, there are many ETL tools in the marketplace. Compared to other ETL tools, AWS Glue is a low-cost and serverless solution.

Overall, I rate AWS Glue a nine out of ten.