AWS Big Data Blog

Category: Best Practices

Streamlined monitoring and debugging for Amazon EMR on EC2

In this post, we walk you through five key enhancements: Amazon CloudWatch Logs integration, step-level Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) logging controls, expanded console UIs for YARN and Tez, Amazon EMR step to YARN application ID mapping, and enhanced custom metrics with updated documentation.

Improve DynamoDB analytics with AWS Glue zero-ETL schema and partition controls

In this post, you learn how to replicate Amazon DynamoDB data to Apache Iceberg tables in Amazon S3 through a zero-ETL integration. We walk through the challenges that the DynamoDB nested, schema-flexible data model introduces for analytics workloads, and show you how to configure schema unnesting and data partitioning for a sample product catalog table. We also cover how to query the replicated data in Amazon Athena using standard SQL.

A guide to capacity planning for Airflow worker pool in Amazon MWAA

In our previous post, A guide to Airflow worker pool optimization in Amazon MWAA, we explored when adding workers to your Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow (Amazon MWAA) environment actually solves performance issues, and when it doesn’t. We walked through patterns like high CPU utilization and long queue times where scaling may be appropriate, […]

A guide to Airflow worker pool optimization in Amazon MWAA

Optimizing the Airflow worker pool configuration in Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow (Amazon MWAA), the AWS fully managed Apache Airflow service, is an important yet often overlooked strategy for scaling workflow operations. Tasks queued for longer periods can create the illusion that additional workers are the solution, when in reality the root cause might […]

Designing centralized and distributed network connectivity patterns for Amazon OpenSearch Serverless – Part 2

(Continued from Part 1) In this post, we show how you can give on-premises clients and spoke account resources private access to OpenSearch Serverless collections distributed across multiple business unit accounts.

Designing centralized and distributed network connectivity patterns for Amazon OpenSearch Serverless – Part 1

In this post, we show how organizations can provide secure, private access to multiple Amazon OpenSearch Serverless collections from both on-premises environments and distributed AWS accounts using a single centralized interface VPC endpoint and Route 53 Profiles.

Best practices for Amazon Redshift Lambda User-Defined Functions

While working with Lambda User-Defined Functions (UDFs) in Amazon Redshift, knowing best practices may help you streamline the respective feature development and reduce common performance bottlenecks and unnecessary costs. You wonder what programming language could improve your UDF performance, how else can you use batch processing benefits, what concurrency management considerations might be applicable in your case? In this post, we answer these and other questions by providing a consolidated view of practices to improve your Lambda UDF efficiency. We explain how to choose a programming language, use existing libraries effectively, minimize payload sizes, manage return data, and batch processing. We discuss scalability and concurrency considerations at both the account and per-function levels. Finally, we examine the benefits and nuances of using external services with your Lambda UDFs.

Reducing costs for shuffle-heavy Apache Spark workloads with serverless storage for Amazon EMR Serverless

In this post, we explore the cost improvements we observed when benchmarking Apache Spark jobs with serverless storage on EMR Serverless. We take a deeper look at how serverless storage helps reduce costs for shuffle-heavy Spark workloads, and we outline practical guidance on identifying the types of queries that can benefit most from enabling serverless storage in your EMR Serverless Spark jobs.

Kinesis On-demand Advantage saves 60%+ on streaming costs

On November 4, 2025, Amazon Kinesis Data Streams introduced On-demand Advantage mode, a capability that enables on-demand streams to handle instant throughput increases at scale and cost optimization for consistent streaming workloads. Historically, you had to choose between provisioned mode, which required managing stream capacity, and on-demand mode, which automatically scaled capacity, but this new offering removes the need to think about stream type at all. In this post, we show three real-world scenarios comparing different usage patterns and demonstrate how On-demand Advantage mode can optimize your streaming costs while maintaining performance and flexibility.