Important AWS Glue Interview Questions

In this blog post, we will look at some of the frequent and important AWS Glue Interview questions.

Question: What do you understand by AWS Glue?

Answer: Glue is a fully managed extract, transform, and load(ETL) service provided by Amazon Web Services(AWS) that allows the automation of discovery, preparation, and creation of business-ready datasets (BRD), machine learning, and application development processes. AWS glue makes moving and transforming data between various data sources easier.

Question: What are the different components of AWS Glue?

Answer: There are three main components in AWS Glue.

  • Data Catalog: It is a central metadata repository that stores information about various data sources and their transformations.
  • ETL Engine: It is a serverless and scalable data processing engine for running Glue jobs.
  • Development Endpoint: It is an interactive environment provided by Glue for developing and testing ETL Scripts

Question: What are different programming languages supported by AWS Glue?

Answer: AWS Glue currently supports two programming languages for developing ETL scripts.

  • Python
  • Scala

Question: What is the purpose of AWS Glue Jobs?

Answer: AWS Glue jobs perform data transformation and move data between different data stores. We can create, schedule, or manage Glue jobs using the AWS Management console, AWS SDK, or AWS CL.

Question: Can AWS Glue be used in developing applications that involve Streaming Data?

Answer: AWS Glue can be used with streaming data by using the AWS Glue Streaming ETL-based process. It allows for real-time processing, and analytics of streaming data by reading, processing, and loading data into a target Datastore.

Question: Does AWS Glue support Schema evolution in source data?

Answer: AWS Glue crawlers can detect the schema change automatically and update the metadata in the Data Catalog. It can detect the changes, such as the addition of new columns or changes in the data type of existing columns.

Question: How many different types of AWS Glue triggers are out there?

Answer: There are three different types of Glue Triggers.

  • On-Demand Triggers: It is triggered manually by users or through API.
  • Schedule-based Triggers: It is triggered based on a specific schedule.
  • Event-based Triggers: This is triggered when a specific event occurs, such as the completion of another Glue job or an event in a data pipeline.

Question: What do you understand by AWS Glue Studio?

Answer: AWS Glue studio is a user interface for creating, managing, and monitoring AWS Glue ETL jobs. It provides drag and drag-and-drop interface for defining sources, transformation, and targets which generates the ETL code automatically.

Question: What are the different advantages of using AWS Glue over traditional ETL-based solutions?

Answer: There are many advantages of using AWS Glue. Some of the important are given below.

  • Fully Managed Service without having to manage any infrastructure
  • Pay-as-you-go pricing model
  • Handles various workloads automatically
  • Supports various data formats and sources
  • Seamless integration with other AWS Services