DEA-C01
AWS Glue for the DEA-C01: What a Data Engineer Needs to Know (2026)
Sep 25, 2026
If you’re sitting the Data Engineer exam, Glue is one you have to know cold. It’s Amazon’s serverless ETL tool — it grabs your data, figures out its shape, and transforms it, without you spinning up a single cluster.
The three pieces that do the work
A crawler scans data in S3, infers the schema, and writes it to the Data Catalog — a central directory Athena and Redshift Spectrum can query. ETL jobs run Spark transformations, and job bookmarks track what’s already processed so jobs don’t redo old work.
Glue vs EMR
Both run Spark. With Glue nobody manages the cluster (serverless); with EMR you own it. Want Spark without managing clusters? Glue.
Test yourself
A team needs a serverless way to catalog the schema of S3 data and run scheduled Spark transformations without managing clusters. Which service is best?
- Amazon EMR
- AWS Glue
- Amazon Athena
- AWS Batch
👉 Click to reveal the answer & explanation
Correct answer: B. Glue is serverless ETL with a built-in Data Catalog and scheduled Spark jobs. EMR (A) requires cluster management; Athena (C) is interactive SQL, not ETL orchestration; Batch (D) is general compute batching.
Related topics
Amazon Athena · Amazon Redshift · Kinesis Data Streams
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