AWS Data Engineering Guide: Everything you need to know
Enterprises are increasingly moving towards cloud platforms to achieve business objectives and optimize their business operations including data management. Not only these services have transformed the game of managing data and applications, but many Cloud Services have also dished out brilliant user experience at an inexpensive cost with the addition of Data Analytics for research. It further leads to the simplification of processes, allowing organizations to focus more on business growth. Several Data Engineering processes have come into the picture for the seamless management of Cloud Services. Names like Google Cloud, AWS, and Microsoft Azure have designed proper Cloud Infrastructure for organizations and individuals. To provide a seamless experience to users, these Cloud Platforms use several solutions such as Data Migration, Data Engineering, and Data Analytics. AWS Data Engineering encompasses one of the core elements in the AWS data platforms which provide a complete solution to users. It also manages data pipelines, transfers, and storage. For instance, to transform data into a uniform schema, AWS Engineering utilizes AWS Glue to give out all the functionalities. Moreover, it handles the Data Catalog that poses as a central repository of metadata. AWS Glue is capable of handling tasks completed in weeks rather than months. On the other hand, Data Visualization, with an apt representation of data using interactive charts, graphs, and tables, plays an important role in AWS Data Engineering. All the information from the Data Warehouse and Data Lakes poses as inputs for the tools to generate reports, charts, and insights from AWS data tools. Simply explained, data warehouse stores and uses structured data that is ready for strategic analysis while a data lake uses and stores both structured and unstructured data for use in the future. Advanced BI tools powered by Machine Learning provide deeper insights from data and help users find relationships, compositions, and distribution in data. What is Data Engineering? For us to understand Data Engineering, we have to understand the “engineering” part better. What do Engineers do? They design and build things. Therefore, data engineers can be thought of as people who design and make pipelines that change and help transport data in a format. This format helps the data to reach the Data Scientist or other users in a highly usable state. These solutions collect data from several sources and accumulate them in a single warehouse that holds all the data as a single source of truth. Over the years, the definition of Data Engineering has not changed much even though the technology and the tools have changed drastically. In simple words, Data Engineering is the foundation that holds data science and analytics together with the use of technology and data processing. Moreover, while conventional technologies like relational and transactional databases still have a place in big data architecture, fresh tools and technology have created innovation in the space. What is AWS? AWS, short for Amazon Web Services, is an on-demand cloud service provider that has various offerings under its umbrella. The organization is a subdivision of Amazon that can provide infrastructure, distributed computing facilities, and hardware to its customers. The various offerings from the organization are known as Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), Software as a service (SaaS), and Platform as a service (PaaS). AWS competes with names like Microsoft Azure, Alibaba Cloud, and Google Cloud. All these organizations are focused on improving the performance of an organization and reducing costs at the same time. Most of these platforms charge their users on a per-use basis. In comparison, an organization need not invest in setting up and maintaining complex IT infrastructure for its requirements at its premises. AWS data centers are located in various parts of the world and the customer has the choice to select the data center that is closest to their target customer. The various services offered by AWS include Security, Data Warehouse, Data Analytics, Cloud Computing, Database Storage, etc. AWS data management allows auto-scale with which a user can scale up or down the requirements for storage and computing capabilities based on the requirements of the business. What is AWS Data Engineering? There has been a phenomenal increase in the volume of data that is being generated by businesses and consumers. Organizations are looking at solutions to help manage, process, and optimally utilize this data. As a result, AWS Data Engineering came into the picture which can package and handle all the requirements of the customers as per their needs. An AWS Engineer is expected to analyze the customer requirements and propose an integrated package that can provide an optimal performance ecosystem to the organization. AWS Data Engineering is also used to ensure that data presented to the end users are in an analysis-ready form and can deliver the right insights. AWS Data Engineering Tools In recent times, we have seen several changes because of different tools designed by AWS for specific needs. The various tools used in the AWS ecosystem can be explained as follows: Data Ingestion Tools These tools are used to extract various types of raw data like text from multiple sources, real-time data, logs, etc which are then used to store in a storage pool. The data ingestion tools provide solutions with which users can collect data from multiple sources. It is one of the most time-consuming processes in the AWS Data Engineering cycle. The data ingestion tools provided by AWS are as follows: Amazon Kinesis Firehose The Kinesis Firehose tool from Amazon can deliver real-time streaming data to the S3 tool. It also can configure the data transformation before it is stored on the S3. Kinesis Firehose supports encryption, compression, and data batching features The scalability and volume depend on the data streaming yield. Kinesis Firehose is used in the AWS ecosystem to provide a seamless transfer of encrypted data. AWS Snowball Snowball from AWS is an amazing tool that can handle enterprise data from on-premise databases to the S3 tool. To avoid data and effort duplication, AWS used a snowball technique that can be
Read More