AWS Data Engineering Services: A Quick Overview

Olusegun Ajose
6 min readMar 6, 2023

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AWS provides a variety of services that can be used to build a scalable and efficient data pipeline. In this article, we will provide an overview of the various data engineering services that can be used to create an end-to-end data pipeline on AWS.

  1. Data Ingestion: Amazon Kinesis, AWS IoT, and AWS DataSync

AWS offers several services for data ingestion, including Amazon Kinesis, AWS IoT, and AWS DataSync. Amazon Kinesis is a real-time streaming data platform that can be used to ingest and process large volumes of data from a variety of sources. AWS IoT is a managed service that can be used to securely connect and manage IoT devices and collect data from them. AWS DataSync is a service that can be used to automate the transfer of data between on-premises storage and AWS.

2. Data Processing: AWS Glue, AWS Lambda, and Amazon EMR

Once data is ingested, you can use AWS services for data processing. AWS offers a variety of data processing services, including AWS Glue, AWS Lambda, and Amazon EMR.

AWS Glue is a fully managed extract, transform, and load (ETL) service that makes it easy to move data between data stores. AWS Glue is a fully-managed ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) service that makes it easy to move data between data stores. It can also crawl the data in S3 to infer its schema and metadata. AWS Glue supports various data sources such as JDBC, Amazon S3, Amazon RDS, and Amazon DynamoDB.

AWS Lambda is a serverless computing service that allows you to run code without provisioning or managing servers. It can be integrated with other AWS services, such as Amazon S3, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon Kinesis, making it easy to build data processing pipelines. For example, you can use AWS Lambda to process data as it is added to an S3 bucket, or to trigger data processing when a new message is added to a Kinesis stream.

Amazon EMR (Elastic MapReduce) is a managed Hadoop framework that can be used to process large amounts of data. It can run various big data processing frameworks such as Apache Spark, Apache Hadoop, and Presto. EMR can also be integrated with AWS Glue for ETL processing. EMR can scale up or down based on the workload, making it a cost-effective option for data processing.

3. Data Storage: Amazon S3, Amazon EFS, and Amazon DynamoDB

The first step in building a data pipeline is to store the data. AWS provides several options for data storage, including Amazon S3, Amazon EFS, and Amazon DynamoDB.

Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is a popular choice for storing data. It is a highly scalable object storage service that can store and retrieve any amount of data from anywhere on the web. S3 can be used to store data in various formats such as text, images, audio, and video. It also provides features such as versioning, access control, and lifecycle management.

Amazon EFS is a fully managed file system that can be used to store and access files from multiple instances. Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL database that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data and can handle millions of requests per second.

4. Data Catalog: AWS Glue Data Catalog

One important aspect of data management is having a data catalog to organize and make sense of your data. AWS offers AWS Glue Data Catalog, a fully managed metadata repository that makes it easy to discover, understand, and manage your data.

With AWS Glue Data Catalog, you can create and manage metadata tables for your data stored in Amazon S3 or other data stores.

5. Application Integration: Amazon EventBridge

Application integration is a critical aspect of modern data engineering, as it enables the seamless flow of data between different systems and services.

One of the key services for application integration in AWS is Amazon EventBridge. EventBridge allows you to set up rules that trigger actions in response to events. For example, you could set up a rule to trigger a Lambda function when a file is uploaded to an S3 bucket, or to trigger a Glue job when data is added to a particular database table.

EventBridge also integrates with a variety of other AWS services, including SNS and SQS, making it a flexible and powerful tool for building event-driven applications.

6. Data Warehousing: Amazon Redshift

Amazon Redshift is a data warehousing service that can be used to store and analyze large amounts of data. It is a fully-managed service that can scale up or down based on the workload. Redshift supports SQL-based querying, making it easy to query and analyze the data stored in it. It can also be integrated with various business intelligence tools such as Tableau and Looker.

7. Data Analytics: Athena and QuickSight

Athena is a serverless interactive query service that can be used to analyze data in S3. It supports SQL-based querying, making it easy to query data in S3 without the need for a database. Athena can also be integrated with AWS Glue for ETL processing.

QuickSight is a business intelligence service that can be used to create interactive dashboards and visualizations. It can be integrated with various data sources such as Athena, Redshift, and S3.

8. Data Pipeline Orchestration: AWS Step Functions

AWS Step Functions is a serverless workflow service that can be used to orchestrate data processing workflows. It supports various AWS services such as AWS Lambda, AWS Batch, and Amazon SNS. Step Functions can also be used to build complex workflows that involve multiple services.

Conclusion:

In conclusion, AWS provides a variety of data engineering services that can be used to build a scalable and efficient data pipeline.

These services can be used together to create an end-to-end data pipeline that can ingest, transform, store, process, and analyze large amounts of data. By using these services, data engineers can focus on building the pipeline rather than managing infrastructure, making it easier to build and maintain a data pipeline.

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Olusegun Ajose

Data Scientist with experience in software development and machine learning. Currently focused on building responsible Artificial Intelligence solutions.