AWS Glue: Time for Modern Data Integration

The amount of data at an organizational level is growing rapidly, and so the need to make the proper use of that data to accelerate innovation and derive business insights. ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) is the process to extract raw data, transform that data into usable format and load that data in to the system to solve business problems. But there are various limitations and challenges of using traditional or legacy ETLs when it comes to suffice modern data integration needs. Let’s take a closer look at the need of migrating legacy ETLs.

Why Consider Migrating Legacy ETLs?

Traditional ETLs present limitations in meeting modern business intelligence and analytics requirements. The legacy ETL tool typically follows batch-oriented approach for processing data that can result in to hours or days old data thereby reducing the required effectiveness. Common challenges with the traditional ETL include:

• High licensing cost
• Non-availability of usage based pricing
• Lacks scalability and complex to manage
• Legacy ETLs do not seamlessly fit with modern data lake tools and architectures

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Introduction of AWS Glue Platform

AWS Glue is a serverless cloud-based ETL service that is powered by a big data engine to provide data-intensive computation. It facilitates all the data integration services to transform data for optimal use in a cost-effective manner and at a faster pace. Creating, running and monitoring ETL workflows is a lot easier and possible with a few clicks in AWS Glue Studio, a visual drag and drop tool.

AWS Glue is a key component of AWS data lake architecture and works seamlessly with other AWS services like Redshift and SageMaker to power your analytics and machine learning requirements.

AWS Glue consists of components such as central metadata repository, an ETL engine and a flexible scheduler that provides data-intensive computation.

Benefits of AWS Glue

Glue is different from other ETL products in several ways. Let’s take a look at the benefits of this modern data integration tool.

• Completely serverless thereby reducing the infrastructure cost to set up and manage
• Different groups across the organization can work together on data integration tasks using AWS Glue that can reduce the time required for analyzing the data and put it to use within minutes
• Glue runs on a highly scalable Spock execution engine that allows users to pay only for the resources they consume while the jobs are running
• Automatic schema inference
• Seamless development and execution experience with AWSGlue Studio
• A zero-code ETL tool for data scientists and analysts

Accelerate your ETL Migration Initiatives

Pain of Migrating ETLs

AWS Glue is a powerful serverless cloud ETL that provides advantages for modern data integration needs, but migrating legacy ETL to AWS Glue is a no easy feat. Challenges that can hold you back from the migration initiatives include:

• Difficult to precisely estimate time and cost of migration
• Time consuming
• Unexpected challenges can result in significant re-work effort and increased conversion costs
• Requires rigorous testing
• Incompatibility issues due to environmental changes

The manual approach to migration is tedious and resource-intensive, delaying the migration decision for organizations.

Bitwise ETL Migration Solution:

When migrating a data warehouse to the cloud, utilizing the right migration solution plays an important role in the success of your migration journey.

With over 10+ years of ETL Migration experience with leading tools like Informatica, Ab Initio, SSIS, DataStage, Talend and PL/SQL, Bitwise has built a proven ETL Migration Practice that uses the right combination of automation, best practices and experience to successfully accelerate migration to AWS Glue Studio.

• End-to-end migration using in-house built automation tools at every phase
• Knowledge base and best practices for architecting optimal solution in AWS
• Ready pool of ETL migration specialists and AWS Glue experts

The solution ensures a systematic approach for highly secure and accurate migrations that can reduce the migration cost by up to 60% and migration time by up to 50%.

Why AWS Glue is a Good Choice?

AWS Glue, a managed server-less ETL, powered by a big data engine, quickly gained popularity due to the efficient and cost-effective approach to various data-driven problems and computations such as analytics, machine learning, discovering, preparing and combining data and application development. The variety of features and functionalities within AWS Glue result in a rapid development of an ETL solution reducing the efforts and time required for the development.

Running Legacy ETL Tool

• Legacy ETL tools are often expensive because of the licensing cost, vendor lock-in, and inflexibility while scaling up or down.
• AWS Glue provides open-source components with pipe, python py, Spark, and Scala that can re-enable no vendor lock-in.

Building ETLs from Scratch

• Building the ETLs from scratch can be resource consuming while managing on Spark environments and complex from infrastructure standpoint.
• Adopting AWS Glue can be 5x cheaper than setting up on your own spark cluster and it also requires 4x less resources to manage.

Running Cloud-native ETLs

• Running cloud ETL can be an expensive option considering the additional cost involved for infrastructure and licensing.
• With the serverless deployment model AWS Glue can be 55% cheaper than the other cloud providers and required on infrastructure costs.

Seamless Migration to AWS Glue

For organizations focused on digital transformation and taking advantage of the benefits of cloud, migrating legacy tools to the cloud seems surely favourable . AWS offers a great option when it comes to a cloud ETL. Bitwise, an AWS partner, offers end-to-end migration solution to help our customers quickly get rid of the legacy tools and migrate to Glue to accelerate innovation.