AWS Glue Connections

What are AWS Glue Connections?

• Metadata for External Data Stores: Glue Connections provide a way to store and manage the connection details required to access various external data sources from within AWS Glue.
• Simplified Management: Instead of embedding connection strings directly in Crawler or ETL job code, you create reusable Glue Connection objects which store this information.

Key Components of a Glue Connection

• Connection Type: Specifies the type of data store (e.g., JDBC for databases, S3, Network, or Marketplace for vendor-specific sources).
• Connection Properties: The required information varies based on the type:
  • Databases: Hostname/IP, port, username, password, database name
  • S3: Bucket name, access keys (if not IAM role-based)
  • Network: VPC, Subnet, security groups (if connecting to sources within your VPC)
• Security: Optionally define how to handle credentials (use IAM roles, store in Secrets Manager, etc.).

Benefits of AWS Glue Connections

• Centralized Management: Update connection details in one place, impacting all jobs and crawlers using that connection.
• Security: Avoid hardcoding sensitive credentials in your code. Glue Connections can integrate with AWS Secrets Manager for enhanced secret handling.
• Ease of Use: Simplifies the configuration of crawlers and ETL jobs, as you can select pre-defined connections.
• Reusability: A single connection can be used by multiple crawlers and jobs.

Supported Connection Types

• JDBC: For connecting to relational databases like MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, SQL Server, etc.
• S3
• Network: Enables access to data sources running inside your VPCs.
• AWS Marketplace: Provides connectors for various vendor-specific sources and SaaS products.

Hands-on Lab: Create a Glue connection refer to RDS database