Chapter 3: The AWS Data Engineer's Toolkit

Back in 2006, Amazon launched Amazon Web Services (AWS) to offer on-demand delivery of IT resources over the internet, essentially creating the cloud computing industry. Ever since then, AWS has been innovating at an incredible pace, continually launching new services and features to offer broad and deep functionality across a wide range of IT services.

Traditionally organizations built their own big data processing systems in their data centers, implementing commercial or open source solutions designed to help them make sense of ever-increasing quantities of data. However, these systems were often complex to install, requiring a team of people to maintain, optimize, and update, and scaling these systems was a challenge, requiring large infrastructure spend and significant delays while waiting for hardware vendors to install new compute and storage systems.

Cloud computing has enabled the removal of many of these challenges, including...