Glue Workflows orchestrate multiple Glue crawlers and ETL jobs into a single, managed pipeline with dependencies — so a multi-step data-processing flow runs in order without external orchestration.
Workflows vs Step Functions
Glue Workflows orchestrate Glue-native components (crawlers + jobs + triggers) inside Glue. Step Functions orchestrates across many AWS services. If the whole pipeline is Glue crawlers and jobs, a Glue Workflow is the natural fit; if it spans many services, use Step Functions.
Test yourself
A data pipeline consists of a Glue crawler followed by several dependent Glue ETL jobs that must run in order. What orchestrates this within Glue?
- A single large ETL job
- A Glue Workflow
- Amazon SQS
- A cron job on EC2
👉 Click to reveal the answer & explanation
Correct answer: B. A Glue Workflow chains crawlers and jobs with dependencies inside Glue, running them in order. Cramming everything into one job (A) loses modularity; SQS (C) is messaging; a cron job on EC2 (D) means managing external orchestration.
Related topics
AWS Glue · Glue crawlers vs jobs · AWS Step Functions
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