AWS Glue jobs is the AWS service or feature that will meet the requirements with the least development effort over time. AWS Glue jobs is a fully managed service that enables data engineers to run Apache Spark applications on a serverless Spark environment. AWS Glue jobs can perform batch preprocessing data transformations on large datasets stored in Amazon S3, such as converting data formats, filtering data, joining data, and aggregating data. AWS Glue jobs can also scale the Spark environment automatically based on the data volume and processing needs, without requiring any infrastructure provisioning or management. AWS Glue jobs can reduce the development effort and time by providing a graphical interface to create and monitor Spark applications, as well as a code generation feature that can generate Scala or Python code based on the data sources and targets. AWS Glue jobs can also integrate with other AWS services, such as Amazon Athena, Amazon EMR, and Amazon SageMaker, to enable further data analysis and machine learning tasks1.
The other options are either more complex or less scalable than AWS Glue jobs. Amazon EMR cluster is a managed service that enables data engineers to run Apache Spark applications on a cluster of Amazon EC2 instances. However, Amazon EMR cluster requires more development effort and time than AWS Glue jobs, as it involves setting up, configuring, and managing the cluster, as well as writing and deploying the Spark code. Amazon EMR cluster also does not scale automatically, but requires manual or scheduled resizing of the cluster based on the data volume and processing needs2. Amazon Athena is a serverless interactive query service that enables data engineers to analyze data stored in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. However, Amazon Athena is not suitable for performing complex data transformations, such as joining data from multiple sources, aggregating data, or applying custom logic. Amazon Athena is also not designed for running Spark applications, but only supports SQL queries3. AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service that enables data engineers to run code without provisioning or managing servers. However, AWS Lambda is not optimized for running Spark applications, as it has limitations on the execution time, memory size, and concurrency of the functions. AWS Lambda is also not integrated with Amazon S3, and requires additional steps to read and write data from S3 buckets.
References:
1: AWS Glue - Fully Managed ETL Service - Amazon Web Services
2: Amazon EMR - Amazon Web Services
3: Amazon Athena – Interactive SQL Queries for Data in Amazon S3
[4]: AWS Lambda – Serverless Compute - Amazon Web Services