Category: AWS Step Functions

Extract, transform, and load (ETL) is the process of reading source data, applying transformation rules to this data, and loading it into the target structures. ETL is performed for various reasons. Sometimes ETL helps align source data to target data structures, whereas other times ETL is done to derive business value by cleansing, standardizing, combining, […]

Data volumes in organizations are increasing at an unprecedented rate, exploding from terabytes to petabytes and in some cases exabytes. As data volume increases, it attracts more and more users and applications to use the data in many different ways—sometime referred to as data gravity. As data gravity increases, we need to find tools and […]

One of the key phases of a machine learning (ML) workflow is data preprocessing, which involves cleaning, exploring, and transforming the data. AWS Glue DataBrew, announced in AWS re:Invent 2020, is a visual data preparation tool that enables you to develop common data preparation steps without having to write any code or installation. In this […]

At re:Invent 2020, we announced the general availability of Amazon EMR on Amazon EKS, a new deployment option for Amazon EMR that allows you to automate the provisioning and management of open-source big data frameworks on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS). With Amazon EMR on EKS, you can now run Spark applications alongside other […]

Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow (Amazon MWAA) is a fully managed service that makes it easy to run open-source versions of Apache Airflow on AWS and build workflows to run your extract, transform, and load (ETL) jobs and data pipelines. You can use AWS Step Functions as a serverless function orchestrator to build scalable […]

Large enterprises often provide software offerings to multiple customers by providing each customer a dedicated and isolated environment (a software offering composed of multiple single-tenant environments). Because the data is in various independent systems, large enterprises are looking for ways to simplify data processing pipelines. To address this, you can create data lakes to bring […]

Amazon EMR allows you to process vast amounts of data quickly and cost-effectively at scale. Using open-source tools such as Apache Spark, Apache Hive, and Presto, and coupled with the scalable storage of Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon EMR gives analytical teams the engines and elasticity to run petabyte-scale analysis for a fraction […]

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is an important aspect of today’s technology world, and processing data in compliance with GDPR is a necessity for those who implement solutions within the AWS public cloud. One article of GDPR is the “right to erasure” or “right to be forgotten” which may require you to implement a solution […]

In this post, I show how to use AWS Step Functions and AWS Glue Python Shell to orchestrate tasks for those Amazon Redshift-based ETL workflows in a completely serverless fashion. AWS Glue Python Shell is a Python runtime environment for running small to medium-sized ETL tasks, such as submitting SQL queries and waiting for a response. Step Functions lets you coordinate multiple AWS services into workflows so you can easily run and monitor a series of ETL tasks. Both AWS Glue Python Shell and Step Functions are serverless, allowing you to automatically run and scale them in response to events you define, rather than requiring you to provision, scale, and manage servers.

In this post, I show you how to use AWS Glue’s DynamoDB integration and AWS Step Functions to create a workflow to export your DynamoDB tables to S3 in Parquet. I also show how to create an Athena view for each table’s latest snapshot, giving you a consistent view of your DynamoDB table exports.