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AWS Guides & Tutorials
AWS for data engineers — S3, EC2, Lambda, Glue, Redshift, Athena, EMR and the certification roadmap that gets you hired.
AWS articles
Athena vs Redshift: When to Use Each
Athena and Redshift both run SQL on AWS, but one is a query service over files in S3 and the other is a data warehouse. This comparison covers where the data lives, how each is billed, behaviour under many users, updates and modelling, AWS's own guidance, and the common design that uses both.
AWS Solutions Architect Associate: A Study Guide
A study guide for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate exam, SAA-C03, built from the official exam guide: format and passing score, the four design domains and their tasks, how scenario questions are constructed, a method for studying by trade-off, and how the exam relates to data engineering.
Amazon Athena: Querying S3 with SQL
An explanation of Amazon Athena for people new to it: what the service is, how a table is only metadata pointing at files in S3, what happens when a query runs, where results go, how billing by bytes scanned works, how workgroups cap spending, and where Athena fits beside Redshift and EMR.
Athena Federated Queries Explained
Athena Federated Query lets one SQL statement read from sources outside S3, such as DynamoDB, MySQL or Redshift, and join them with data lake tables. This guide explains connectors, predicate pushdown, passthrough queries, the documented limits, how billing works, and when copying the data is the better design.
AWS Glue Data Catalog and Crawlers Explained
The Glue Data Catalog is the index of an AWS data lake, and crawlers are the usual way to fill it. This guide explains what the catalog stores, how a crawler classifies files and decides between tables and partitions, what three real files with drifting schemas show, and the settings that keep crawlers predictable.
Amazon EMR Explained: Big Data on AWS
Amazon EMR runs Spark, Hadoop, Hive and other big data frameworks on AWS. This guide explains primary, core and task nodes, why data belongs in S3 and not in the cluster's HDFS, how work is submitted as steps, transient versus long-running clusters, the Serverless and EKS options, and what decides the bill.