Running Spark on Amazon Web Services (AWS)

When you search thought the net looking for methods of running Apache Spark on AWS infrastructure you are most likely to be redirected to the documentation of AWS EMR (Elastic Map Reduce) service, which is Amazon's Hadoop distribution suited to run in AWS cloud environment. It's quite an easy way to deploy your data pipelines, but sometimes bootstrapping a huge cluster to perform simple ad-hoc analysis it's a cumbersome task. They say:

"to a man with a hammer everything looks like a nail" :)

and we felt into this trap with EMR once.

The article below describes two other ways of running Apache Spark jobs on AWS-managed infrastructure - AWS Glue and AWS Fargate - that we use on our clients' data warehousing projects. You will find there the key differences between these methods when it comes to flexibility and pricing, showing why there is no place for "one service fits all" approach in AWS world.

Check out!