to steer the cloud trade with a whopping 32% share as a result of its early market entry, sturdy expertise and complete service choices. Nevertheless, many customers discover AWS difficult to navigate, and this discontentment lead extra firms and organisations to choose its rivals Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.
Regardless of its steeper studying curve and fewer intuitive interface, AWS stays the highest cloud service as a result of its reliability, hybrid cloud and most service choices. Extra importantly, the collection of correct methods can considerably cut back configuration complexity, streamline workflows, and increase efficiency.
On this article, I’ll introduce an environment friendly approach to arrange a whole ETL pipeline with orchestration on AWS, primarily based by myself expertise. It can additionally offer you a refreshed view on the manufacturing of information with AWS or make you are feeling much less struggling when conducting configuration if that is your first time to make use of AWS for sure duties.
Technique for Designing an Environment friendly Knowledge Pipeline
AWS has probably the most complete ecosystem with its huge providers. To construct a production-ready knowledge warehouse on AWS not less than requires the next providers:
- IAM – Though this service isn’t included into any a part of the workflow, it’s the muse for accessing all different providers.
- AWS S3 – Knowledge Lake storage
- AWS Glue – ETL processing
- Amazon Redshift – Knowledge Warehouse
- CloudWatch – Monitoring and logging
You additionally want entry to Airflow if it’s important to schedule extra advanced dependencies and conduct superior retries when it comes to error dealing with though Redshift can deal with some fundamental cron jobs.
To make your work simpler, I extremely advocate to put in an IDE (Visible Studio Code or PyCharm and naturally you may select your personal favorite IDE). An IDE dramatically improves your effectivity for advanced python code, native testing/debugging, model management integration and staff collaboration. And within the subsequent session, I’ll present step-by-step configurations.
Preliminary Setup
Listed here are the steps of preliminary configurations:
- Launch a digital surroundings in your IDE
- Set up dependencies – mainly, we have to set up the libraries that shall be used afterward.
pip set up apache-airflow==2.7.0 boto3 pandas pyspark sqlalchemy
- Set up AWS CLI – this step means that you can write scripts to automate varied AWS operations and makes the administration of AWS sources extra effectively.
- AWS Configuration – make sure that to enter these IAM consumer credentials when prompted:
- AWS Entry Key ID: Out of your IAM consumer.
- AWS Secret Entry Key: Out of your IAM consumer.
- Default area:
us-east-1
(or your most well-liked area) - Default output format:
json
.
- Combine Airflow – listed below are the steps:
- Initialize Airflow
- Create DAG information in Airflow
- Run the net server at http://localhost:8080 (login:admin/admin)
- Open one other terminal tab and begin the scheduler
export AIRFLOW_HOME=$(pwd)/airflow
airflow db init
airflow customers create
--username admin
--password admin
--firstname Admin
--lastname Consumer
--role Admin
--email [email protected]
#Initialize Airflow
airflow webserver --port 8080 ##run the webserver
airflow scheduler #begin the scheduler
Improvement Workflow: COVID-19 Knowledge Case Examine
I’m utilizing JHU’s public COVID-19 dataset (CC BY 4.0 licensed) for demonstration goal. You may check with knowledge right here,
The chart under exhibits the workflow from knowledge ingestion to knowledge loading to Redshift tables within the growth surroundings.

Knowledge Ingestion
In step one of information ingestion to AWS S3, I processed knowledge by melting them to lengthy format and changing the date format. I saved the information within the parquet format to enhance the storage effectivity, improve question efficiency and cut back storage prices. The code for this step is as under:
import pandas as pd
from datetime import datetime
import os
import boto3
import sys
def process_covid_data():
strive:
# Load uncooked knowledge
url = "https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19/uncooked/grasp/archived_data/archived_time_series/time_series_19-covid-Confirmed_archived_0325.csv"
df = pd.read_csv(url)
# --- Knowledge Processing ---
# 1. Soften to lengthy format
df = df.soften(
id_vars=['Province/State', 'Country/Region', 'Lat', 'Long'],
var_name='date_str',
value_name='confirmed_cases'
)
# 2. Convert dates (JHU format: MM/DD/YY)
df['date'] = pd.to_datetime(
df['date_str'],
format='%m/%d/%y',
errors='coerce'
).dropna()
# 3. Save as partitioned Parquet
output_dir = "covid_processed"
df.to_parquet(
output_dir,
engine='pyarrow',
compression='snappy',
partition_cols=['date']
)
# 4. Add to S3
s3 = boto3.shopper('s3')
total_files = 0
for root, _, information in os.stroll(output_dir):
for file in information:
local_path = os.path.be part of(root, file)
s3_path = os.path.be part of(
'uncooked/covid/',
os.path.relpath(local_path, output_dir)
)
s3.upload_file(
Filename=local_path,
Bucket='my-dev-bucket',
Key=s3_path
)
total_files += len(information)
print(f"Efficiently processed and uploaded {total_files} Parquet information")
print(f"Knowledge covers from {df['date'].min()} to {df['date'].max()}")
return True
besides Exception as e:
print(f"Error: {str(e)}", file=sys.stderr)
return False
if __name__ == "__main__":
process_covid_data()
After working the python code, it is best to have the ability to see the parquet information within the S3 buckets, underneath the folder of ‘uncooked/covid/’.

ETL Pipeline Improvement
AWS Glue is especially used for ETL Pipeline Improvement. Though it will also be used for knowledge ingestion even when the information hasn’t loaded to S3, its power lies in processing knowledge as soon as it’s in S3 for knowledge warehousing functions. Right here’s PySpark scripts for knowledge rework:
# transform_covid.py
from awsglue.context import GlueContext
from pyspark.sql.capabilities import *
glueContext = GlueContext(SparkContext.getOrCreate())
df = glueContext.create_dynamic_frame.from_options(
"s3",
{"paths": ["s3://my-dev-bucket/raw/covid/"]},
format="parquet"
).toDF()
# Add transformations right here
df_transformed = df.withColumn("load_date", current_date())
# Write to processed zone
df_transformed.write.parquet(
"s3://my-dev-bucket/processed/covid/",
mode="overwrite"
)

The subsequent step is to load knowledge to Redshift. In Redshift Console, click on on “Question Editor Q2” on the left aspect and you’ll edit your SQL code and end the Redshift COPY.
# Create a desk covid_data in dev schema
CREATE TABLE dev.covid_data (
"Province/State" VARCHAR(100),
"Nation/Area" VARCHAR(100),
"Lat" FLOAT8,
"Lengthy" FLOAT8,
date_str VARCHAR(100),
confirmed_cases FLOAT8
)
DISTKEY("Nation/Area")
SORTKEY(date_str);
# COPY knowledge to redshift
COPY dev.covid_data (
"Province/State",
"Nation/Area",
"Lat",
"Lengthy",
date_str,
confirmed_cases
)
FROM 's3://my-dev-bucket/processed/covid/'
IAM_ROLE 'arn:aws:iam::your-account-id:position/RedshiftLoadRole'
REGION 'your-region'
FORMAT PARQUET;
Then you definitely’ll see the information efficiently uploaded to the information warehouse.

Pipeline Automation
The best approach to automate your knowledge pipeline is to schedule jobs underneath Redshift question editor v2 by making a Saved Process (I’ve a extra detailed introduction about SQL Saved Process, you may check with this text).
CREATE OR REPLACE PROCEDURE dev.run_covid_etl()
AS $$
BEGIN
TRUNCATE TABLE dev.covid_data;
COPY dev.covid_data
FROM 's3://simba-dev-bucket/uncooked/covid'
IAM_ROLE 'arn:aws:iam::your-account-id:position/RedshiftLoadRole'
REGION 'your-region'
FORMAT PARQUET;
END;
$$ LANGUAGE plpgsql;

Alternatively, you may run Airflow for scheduled jobs.
from datetime import datetime
from airflow import DAG
from airflow.suppliers.amazon.aws.operators.redshift_sql import RedshiftSQLOperator
default_args = {
'proprietor': 'data_team',
'depends_on_past': False,
'start_date': datetime(2023, 1, 1),
'retries': 2
}
with DAG(
'redshift_etl_dev',
default_args=default_args,
schedule_interval='@every day',
catchup=False
) as dag:
run_etl = RedshiftSQLOperator(
task_id='run_covid_etl',
redshift_conn_id='redshift_dev',
sql='CALL dev.run_covid_etl()',
)
Manufacturing Workflow
Airflow DAG is highly effective to orchestrates your whole ETL pipeline if there are a lot of dependencies and it’s additionally apply in manufacturing surroundings.
After growing and testing your ETL pipeline, you may automate your duties in manufacturing surroundings utilizing Airflow.

Listed here are the examine record of key preparation steps to assist the profitable deployment in Airflow:
- Create S3 bucket
my-prod-bucket
- Create Glue job
prod_covid_transformation
in AWS Console - Create Redshift Saved Process
prod.load_covid_data()
- Configure Airflow
- Configure SMTP for emails in
airflow.cfg
Then the deployment of the information pipeline in Airflow is:
from datetime import datetime, timedelta
from airflow import DAG
from airflow.operators.python import PythonOperator
from airflow.suppliers.amazon.aws.operators.glue import GlueJobOperator
from airflow.suppliers.amazon.aws.operators.redshift_sql import RedshiftSQLOperator
from airflow.operators.electronic mail import EmailOperator
# 1. DAG CONFIGURATION
default_args = {
'proprietor': 'data_team',
'retries': 3,
'retry_delay': timedelta(minutes=5),
'start_date': datetime(2023, 1, 1)
}
# 2. DATA INGESTION FUNCTION
def load_covid_data():
import pandas as pd
import boto3
url = "https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19/uncooked/grasp/archived_data/archived_time_series/time_series_19-covid-Confirmed_archived_0325.csv"
df = pd.read_csv(url)
df = df.soften(
id_vars=['Province/State', 'Country/Region', 'Lat', 'Long'],
var_name='date_str',
value_name='confirmed_cases'
)
df['date'] = pd.to_datetime(df['date_str'], format='%m/%d/%y')
df.to_parquet(
's3://my-prod-bucket/uncooked/covid/',
engine='pyarrow',
partition_cols=['date']
)
# 3. DAG DEFINITION
with DAG(
'covid_etl',
default_args=default_args,
schedule_interval='@every day',
catchup=False
) as dag:
# Process 1: Ingest Knowledge
ingest = PythonOperator(
task_id='ingest_data',
python_callable=load_covid_data
)
# Process 2: Remodel with Glue
rework = GlueJobOperator(
task_id='transform_data',
job_name='prod_covid_transformation',
script_args={
'--input_path': 's3://my-prod-bucket/uncooked/covid/',
'--output_path': 's3://my-prod-bucket/processed/covid/'
}
)
# Process 3: Load to Redshift
load = RedshiftSQLOperator(
task_id='load_data',
sql="CALL prod.load_covid_data()"
)
# Process 4: Notifications
notify = EmailOperator(
task_id='send_email',
to='you-email-address',
topic='ETL Standing: {{ ds }}',
html_content='ETL job accomplished: View Logs'
)
My Remaining Ideas
Though some customers, particularly those that are new to the cloud and in search of easy options are typically daunted by AWS’s excessive barrier to entry and be overwhelmed by the huge decisions of providers, it’s definitely worth the time and efforts and listed below are the explanations:
- The method of configuration, and the designing, constructing and testing of the information pipelines offers you the deep understanding of a typical knowledge engineering workflow. The abilities will profit you even should you produce your tasks with different cloud providers, comparable to Azure, GCP and Alibaba Cloud.
- The mature ecosystem that AWS has and an unlimited array of providers that it provides allow customers to customize their knowledge structure methods and revel in extra flexibility and scalability of their tasks.
Thanks for studying! Hope this text useful to construct your cloud-base knowledge pipeline!