StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Databases
  4. Big Data Tools
  5. AWS Glue vs Apache Flink

AWS Glue vs Apache Flink

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Apache Flink
Apache Flink
Stacks534
Followers879
Votes38
GitHub Stars25.4K
Forks13.7K
AWS Glue
AWS Glue
Stacks461
Followers819
Votes9

AWS Glue vs Apache Flink: What are the differences?

Introduction

This Markdown code provides a comparison between AWS Glue and Apache Flink, highlighting their key differences. Both AWS Glue and Apache Flink are powerful tools used in big data processing and analytics. However, they have distinct features and functionalities that set them apart.

  1. Real-Time Processing: AWS Glue primarily focuses on batch processing, providing batch data integration and transformation. On the other hand, Apache Flink is designed to handle both batch and stream processing. It offers advanced capabilities for real-time data processing, making it suitable for applications that require low-latency data ingestion and analytics.

  2. Ease of Use: AWS Glue offers a fully managed service with an automated infrastructure that simplifies data ingestion, transformation, and cataloging tasks. It provides a user-friendly visual interface for creating ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) jobs without the need for extensive coding knowledge. In contrast, Apache Flink requires more manual configuration and coding expertise, making it more suitable for advanced users or developers familiar with distributed systems.

  3. Connectivity: AWS Glue integrates seamlessly with other AWS services, such as Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon RDS, allowing easy data transfer and transformation within the AWS ecosystem. It also supports connector libraries for various data sources. Apache Flink, on the other hand, provides a wide range of connectors for diverse data systems, including file systems, message queues, and databases, enabling connectivity with various external systems.

  4. Data Processing Model: AWS Glue follows a serverless data processing model, where the underlying infrastructure is abstracted, and users are billed based on the resources consumed during job execution. Apache Flink, on the other hand, offers a distributed data processing framework, allowing users to deploy and manage their own Flink clusters. This gives users more control and flexibility over resource allocation and scaling for different workloads.

  5. Advanced Analytics: Apache Flink provides advanced analytics capabilities for complex event processing, machine learning, and graph processing. It offers a rich set of APIs and libraries for stream processing, state management, and iterative processing, enabling sophisticated data analysis and real-time decision-making. AWS Glue, while providing basic transformation and enrichment capabilities, does not offer the same level of advanced analytics functionality as Apache Flink.

  6. Community and Ecosystem: Apache Flink has a vibrant open-source community with extensive documentation, active support forums, and a wide range of third-party integrations. This makes it easy for users to leverage community-contributed libraries, connectors, and tools for various use cases. AWS Glue, being a managed service within the AWS ecosystem, has a smaller community but benefits from the broader AWS community and ecosystem, providing access to a wide range of AWS services and integrations.

In summary, AWS Glue primarily focuses on batch processing with a user-friendly interface and seamless integration within the AWS ecosystem, while Apache Flink offers advanced capabilities for real-time processing, requires more manual configuration, and has a vibrant open-source community with extensive analytical capabilities.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Advice on Apache Flink, AWS Glue

Aditya
Aditya

Mar 13, 2021

Review

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

220k views220k
Comments
Vamshi
Vamshi

Data Engineer at Tata Consultancy Services

May 29, 2020

Needs adviceonPySparkPySparkAzure Data FactoryAzure Data FactoryDatabricksDatabricks

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?

269k views269k
Comments
Nilesh
Nilesh

Technical Architect at Self Employed

Jul 8, 2020

Needs adviceonElasticsearchElasticsearchKafkaKafka

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.

576k views576k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Apache Flink
Apache Flink
AWS Glue
AWS Glue

Apache Flink is an open source system for fast and versatile data analytics in clusters. Flink supports batch and streaming analytics, in one system. Analytical programs can be written in concise and elegant APIs in Java and Scala.

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

Hybrid batch/streaming runtime that supports batch processing and data streaming programs.;Custom memory management to guarantee efficient, adaptive, and highly robust switching between in-memory and data processing out-of-core algorithms.;Flexible and expressive windowing semantics for data stream programs;Built-in program optimizer that chooses the proper runtime operations for each program;Custom type analysis and serialization stack for high performance
Easy - AWS Glue automates much of the effort in building, maintaining, and running ETL jobs. AWS Glue crawls your data sources, identifies data formats, and suggests schemas and transformations. AWS Glue automatically generates the code to execute your data transformations and loading processes.; Integrated - AWS Glue is integrated across a wide range of AWS services.; Serverless - AWS Glue is serverless. There is no infrastructure to provision or manage. AWS Glue handles provisioning, configuration, and scaling of the resources required to run your ETL jobs on a fully managed, scale-out Apache Spark environment. You pay only for the resources used while your jobs are running.; Developer Friendly - AWS Glue generates ETL code that is customizable, reusable, and portable, using familiar technology - Scala, Python, and Apache Spark. You can also import custom readers, writers and transformations into your Glue ETL code. Since the code AWS Glue generates is based on open frameworks, there is no lock-in. You can use it anywhere.
Statistics
GitHub Stars
25.4K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
13.7K
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
534
Stacks
461
Followers
879
Followers
819
Votes
38
Votes
9
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 16
    Unified batch and stream processing
  • 8
    Out-of-the box connector to kinesis,s3,hdfs
  • 8
    Easy to use streaming apis
  • 4
    Open Source
  • 2
    Low latency
Pros
  • 9
    Managed Hive Metastore
Integrations
YARN Hadoop
YARN Hadoop
Hadoop
Hadoop
HBase
HBase
Kafka
Kafka
Amazon Redshift
Amazon Redshift
Amazon S3
Amazon S3
Amazon RDS
Amazon RDS
Amazon Athena
Amazon Athena
MySQL
MySQL
Microsoft SQL Server
Microsoft SQL Server
Amazon EMR
Amazon EMR
Amazon Aurora
Amazon Aurora
Oracle
Oracle
Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL
Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL

What are some alternatives to Apache Flink, AWS Glue?

Apache Spark

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.

Presto

Presto

Distributed SQL Query Engine for Big Data

Amazon Athena

Amazon Athena

Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. Athena is serverless, so there is no infrastructure to manage, and you pay only for the queries that you run.

lakeFS

lakeFS

It is an open-source data version control system for data lakes. It provides a “Git for data” platform enabling you to implement best practices from software engineering on your data lake, including branching and merging, CI/CD, and production-like dev/test environments.

Druid

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.

Apache Kylin

Apache Kylin

Apache Kylin™ is an open source Distributed Analytics Engine designed to provide SQL interface and multi-dimensional analysis (OLAP) on Hadoop/Spark supporting extremely large datasets, originally contributed from eBay Inc.

Splunk

Splunk

It provides the leading platform for Operational Intelligence. Customers use it to search, monitor, analyze and visualize machine data.

Apache Impala

Apache Impala

Impala is a modern, open source, MPP SQL query engine for Apache Hadoop. Impala is shipped by Cloudera, MapR, and Amazon. With Impala, you can query data, whether stored in HDFS or Apache HBase – including SELECT, JOIN, and aggregate functions – in real time.

Vertica

Vertica

It provides a best-in-class, unified analytics platform that will forever be independent from underlying infrastructure.

Azure Synapse

Azure Synapse

It is an analytics service that brings together enterprise data warehousing and Big Data analytics. It gives you the freedom to query data on your terms, using either serverless on-demand or provisioned resources—at scale. It brings these two worlds together with a unified experience to ingest, prepare, manage, and serve data for immediate BI and machine learning needs.

Related Comparisons

Bootstrap
Materialize

Bootstrap vs Materialize

Laravel
Django

Django vs Laravel vs Node.js

Bootstrap
Foundation

Bootstrap vs Foundation vs Material UI

Node.js
Spring Boot

Node.js vs Spring-Boot

Liquibase
Flyway

Flyway vs Liquibase