AWS Glue
Three things under one name: a catalog every engine reads, crawlers that fill it, and serverless Spark jobs. Compute is billed by the second, the catalog by the object.
Glue writes the tables. Every engine reads the same catalog.
Each part is priced on its own.
Data Catalog
First million objects and first million requests free each month, then about $1 per 100,000 objects.
Crawlers
About $0.44 per DPU-hour while they run. Scheduled crawls add up quickly.
ETL jobs
About $0.44 per DPU-hour, billed by the second. One DPU is 4 vCPUs and 16 GB of memory.
Prices for US East (N. Virginia), check the current price for your region.
Most of the bill comes from here.
How big a worker
A small file transform does not need Spark. Size workers for the data, and turn on auto scaling so idle workers stop billing.
Standard or Flex
Flex runs on spare capacity at a lower price per DPU-hour, with no guaranteed start time. Fits nightly batch, not jobs with a deadline.
How much it reads
Most job time is spent reading. Filter on partition keys and use bookmarks so each run only reads what changed.
A Glue bill, in one line.
Industrial-grade data pipelines
Use cases in production, not POCs: tests, CI/CD, lineage, on-call that sleeps at night.
Read the approach →The one-page AWS Glue field guide.
Best practices, cost traps and performance checks, in the order you should run them. Printable, no fluff.