AWS Glue vs Druid vs Apache Spark

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AWS Glue

459
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+ 1
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Druid

382
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+ 1
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Apache Spark

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AWS Glue vs Apache Spark vs Druid: What are the differences?

Comparison of AWS Glue, Apache Spark, and Druid

Apache Spark, AWS Glue, and Druid are all data processing technologies with specific functionalities and differences. Below are the key differences between AWS Glue and Apache Spark and Druid:

  1. Data Types Handling: AWS Glue has built-in classifiers to automatically recognize various data types, making it easier and faster to process different types of data. Apache Spark supports various data types and allows users to define custom data types as needed. Druid, on the other hand, is optimized for handling time-series data and does not provide as much flexibility with other data types.

  2. Storage Options: AWS Glue integrates seamlessly with various data sources and data destinations within the AWS ecosystem, making it a preferred choice for users working within the AWS environment. Apache Spark is more versatile and can work with different storage options, including HDFS, S3, and more. Druid is typically used with its specialized storage architecture, optimized for analytical queries and aggregation.

  3. Query Processing: Apache Spark is a general-purpose data processing engine that can process batch and streaming data with complex transformations and computations. AWS Glue focuses more on ETL (extract, transform, load) workflows, making it easier to set up data pipelines for data preparation. Druid is optimized for fast analytical queries with sub-second query response times, making it suitable for real-time analytics.

  4. Scalability and Performance: Apache Spark is known for its scalability, as it can distribute computations across a cluster of machines efficiently. AWS Glue also offers scalability and manages the infrastructure dynamically based on the workload. Druid is designed for high performance and fast query processing, especially for time-series data, but may have limitations in handling diverse workloads compared to Spark.

  5. Ease of Use: AWS Glue is a managed ETL service that abstracts many of the underlying complexities, making it easier for users to set up and run data pipelines without managing infrastructure. Apache Spark requires more expertise in setting up and configuring clusters for data processing tasks. Druid's setup and configuration can be more complex due to its specialized architecture and may require specific knowledge to optimize performance.

  6. Cost Considerations: AWS Glue is a fully managed service that charges based on usage, making it cost-effective for users who want to avoid infrastructure management. Apache Spark can be deployed on various cloud services or on-premises, with pricing models varying based on the deployment choice. Druid, being optimized for real-time analytics, may require more infrastructure resources for high-performance queries, potentially increasing operational costs.

In Summary, each of these technologies has its strengths and use cases, with AWS Glue excelling in managed ETL workflows, Apache Spark in general-purpose data processing, and Druid in fast analytical query processing for time-series data.

Advice on AWS Glue, Druid, and Apache Spark

We need to perform ETL from several databases into a data warehouse or data lake. We want to

  • keep raw and transformed data available to users to draft their own queries efficiently
  • give users the ability to give custom permissions and SSO
  • move between open-source on-premises development and cloud-based production environments

We want to use inexpensive Amazon EC2 instances only on medium-sized data set 16GB to 32GB feeding into Tableau Server or PowerBI for reporting and data analysis purposes.

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Replies (3)
John Nguyen
Recommends
on
AirflowAirflowAWS LambdaAWS Lambda

You could also use AWS Lambda and use Cloudwatch event schedule if you know when the function should be triggered. The benefit is that you could use any language and use the respective database client.

But if you orchestrate ETLs then it makes sense to use Apache Airflow. This requires Python knowledge.

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Recommends
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AirflowAirflow

Though we have always built something custom, Apache airflow (https://airflow.apache.org/) stood out as a key contender/alternative when it comes to open sources. On the commercial offering, Amazon Redshift combined with Amazon Kinesis (for complex manipulations) is great for BI, though Redshift as such is expensive.

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Recommends

You may want to look into a Data Virtualization product called Conduit. It connects to disparate data sources in AWS, on prem, Azure, GCP, and exposes them as a single unified Spark SQL view to PowerBI (direct query) or Tableau. Allows auto query and caching policies to enhance query speeds and experience. Has a GPU query engine and optimized Spark for fallback. Can be deployed on your AWS VM or on prem, scales up and out. Sounds like the ideal solution to your needs.

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Nilesh Akhade
Technical Architect at Self Employed · | 5 upvotes · 554K views

We have a Kafka topic having events of type A and type B. We need to perform an inner join on both type of events using some common field (primary-key). The joined events to be inserted in Elasticsearch.

In usual cases, type A and type B events (with same key) observed to be close upto 15 minutes. But in some cases they may be far from each other, lets say 6 hours. Sometimes event of either of the types never come.

In all cases, we should be able to find joined events instantly after they are joined and not-joined events within 15 minutes.

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Replies (2)
Recommends
on
ElasticsearchElasticsearch

The first solution that came to me is to use upsert to update ElasticSearch:

  1. Use the primary-key as ES document id
  2. Upsert the records to ES as soon as you receive them. As you are using upsert, the 2nd record of the same primary-key will not overwrite the 1st one, but will be merged with it.

Cons: The load on ES will be higher, due to upsert.

To use Flink:

  1. Create a KeyedDataStream by the primary-key
  2. In the ProcessFunction, save the first record in a State. At the same time, create a Timer for 15 minutes in the future
  3. When the 2nd record comes, read the 1st record from the State, merge those two, and send out the result, and clear the State and the Timer if it has not fired
  4. When the Timer fires, read the 1st record from the State and send out as the output record.
  5. Have a 2nd Timer of 6 hours (or more) if you are not using Windowing to clean up the State

Pro: if you have already having Flink ingesting this stream. Otherwise, I would just go with the 1st solution.

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Akshaya Rawat
Senior Specialist Platform at Publicis Sapient · | 3 upvotes · 391.2K views
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on
Apache SparkApache Spark

Please refer "Structured Streaming" feature of Spark. Refer "Stream - Stream Join" at https://spark.apache.org/docs/latest/structured-streaming-programming-guide.html#stream-stream-joins . In short you need to specify "Define watermark delays on both inputs" and "Define a constraint on time across the two inputs"

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Vamshi Krishna
Data Engineer at Tata Consultancy Services · | 4 upvotes · 258.6K views

I have to collect different data from multiple sources and store them in a single cloud location. Then perform cleaning and transforming using PySpark, and push the end results to other applications like reporting tools, etc. What would be the best solution? I can only think of Azure Data Factory + Databricks. Are there any alternatives to #AWS services + Databricks?

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Hi all,

Currently, we need to ingest the data from Amazon S3 to DB either Amazon Athena or Amazon Redshift. But the problem with the data is, it is in .PSV (pipe separated values) format and the size is also above 200 GB. The query performance of the timeout in Athena/Redshift is not up to the mark, too slow while compared to Google BigQuery. How would I optimize the performance and query result time? Can anyone please help me out?

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Replies (4)

you can use aws glue service to convert you pipe format data to parquet format , and thus you can achieve data compression . Now you should choose Redshift to copy your data as it is very huge. To manage your data, you should partition your data in S3 bucket and also divide your data across the redshift cluster

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Carlos Acedo
Data Technologies Manager at SDG Group Iberia · | 5 upvotes · 249.6K views
Recommends
on
Amazon RedshiftAmazon Redshift

First of all you should make your choice upon Redshift or Athena based on your use case since they are two very diferent services - Redshift is an enterprise-grade MPP Data Warehouse while Athena is a SQL layer on top of S3 with limited performance. If performance is a key factor, users are going to execute unpredictable queries and direct and managing costs are not a problem I'd definitely go for Redshift. If performance is not so critical and queries will be predictable somewhat I'd go for Athena.

Once you select the technology you'll need to optimize your data in order to get the queries executed as fast as possible. In both cases you may need to adapt the data model to fit your queries better. In the case you go for Athena you'd also proabably need to change your file format to Parquet or Avro and review your partition strategy depending on your most frequent type of query. If you choose Redshift you'll need to ingest the data from your files into it and maybe carry out some tuning tasks for performance gain.

I'll recommend Redshift for now since it can address a wider range of use cases, but we could give you better advice if you described your use case in depth.

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Alexis Blandin
Recommends
on
Amazon AthenaAmazon Athena

It depend of the nature of your data (structured or not?) and of course your queries (ad-hoc or predictible?). For example you can look at partitioning and columnar format to maximize MPP capabilities for both Athena and Redshift

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Recommends

you can change your PSV fomat data to parquet file format with AWS GLUE and then your query performance will be improved

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Pros of AWS Glue
Pros of Druid
Pros of Apache Spark
  • 9
    Managed Hive Metastore
  • 15
    Real Time Aggregations
  • 6
    Batch and Real-Time Ingestion
  • 5
    OLAP
  • 3
    OLAP + OLTP
  • 2
    Combining stream and historical analytics
  • 1
    OLTP
  • 61
    Open-source
  • 48
    Fast and Flexible
  • 8
    One platform for every big data problem
  • 8
    Great for distributed SQL like applications
  • 6
    Easy to install and to use
  • 3
    Works well for most Datascience usecases
  • 2
    Interactive Query
  • 2
    Machine learning libratimery, Streaming in real
  • 2
    In memory Computation

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Cons of AWS Glue
Cons of Druid
Cons of Apache Spark
    Be the first to leave a con
    • 3
      Limited sql support
    • 2
      Joins are not supported well
    • 1
      Complexity
    • 4
      Speed

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    What is AWS Glue?

    A fully managed extract, transform, and load (ETL) service that makes it easy for customers to prepare and load their data for analytics.

    What is Druid?

    Druid is a distributed, column-oriented, real-time analytics data store that is commonly used to power exploratory dashboards in multi-tenant environments. Druid excels as a data warehousing solution for fast aggregate queries on petabyte sized data sets. Druid supports a variety of flexible filters, exact calculations, approximate algorithms, and other useful calculations.

    What is Apache Spark?

    Spark is a fast and general processing engine compatible with Hadoop data. It can run in Hadoop clusters through YARN or Spark's standalone mode, and it can process data in HDFS, HBase, Cassandra, Hive, and any Hadoop InputFormat. It is designed to perform both batch processing (similar to MapReduce) and new workloads like streaming, interactive queries, and machine learning.

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    What are some alternatives to AWS Glue, Druid, and Apache Spark?
    AWS Data Pipeline
    AWS Data Pipeline is a web service that provides a simple management system for data-driven workflows. Using AWS Data Pipeline, you define a pipeline composed of the “data sources” that contain your data, the “activities” or business logic such as EMR jobs or SQL queries, and the “schedule” on which your business logic executes. For example, you could define a job that, every hour, runs an Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR)–based analysis on that hour’s Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) log data, loads the results into a relational database for future lookup, and then automatically sends you a daily summary email.
    Airflow
    Use Airflow to author workflows as directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) of tasks. The Airflow scheduler executes your tasks on an array of workers while following the specified dependencies. Rich command lines utilities makes performing complex surgeries on DAGs a snap. The rich user interface makes it easy to visualize pipelines running in production, monitor progress and troubleshoot issues when needed.
    Talend
    It is an open source software integration platform helps you in effortlessly turning data into business insights. It uses native code generation that lets you run your data pipelines seamlessly across all cloud providers and get optimized performance on all platforms.
    Alooma
    Get the power of big data in minutes with Alooma and Amazon Redshift. Simply build your pipelines and map your events using Alooma’s friendly mapping interface. Query, analyze, visualize, and predict now.
    Databricks
    Databricks Unified Analytics Platform, from the original creators of Apache Spark™, unifies data science and engineering across the Machine Learning lifecycle from data preparation to experimentation and deployment of ML applications.
    See all alternatives