AWS Big Data Blog

Bazaarvoice is an Austin-based company powering a world-leading reviews and ratings platform. Our system processes billions of consumer interactions through ratings, reviews, images, and videos, helping brands and retailers build shopper confidence and drive sales by using authentic user-generated content (UGC) across the customer journey. In this post, we show you the steps we took to migrate our workloads from self-hosted Kafka to Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK). We walk you through our migration process and highlight the improvements we achieved after this transition.

Organizations managing large-scale analytical workloads increasingly face challenges with traditional Apache Parquet-based data lakes with Hive-style partitioning, including slow queries, complex file management, and limited consistency guarantees. Apache Iceberg addresses these pain points by providing ACID transactions, seamless schema evolution, and point-in-time data recovery capabilities that transform how enterprises handle their data infrastructure. In this post, we demonstrate how you can achieve migration at scale from existing Parquet tables to Apache Iceberg tables. Using Amazon DynamoDB as a central orchestration mechanism, we show how you can implement in-place migrations that are highly configurable, repeatable, and fault-tolerant.

In this post, we show you how to implement real-time data ingestion from multiple Kafka topics to Apache Hudi tables using Amazon EMR. This solution streamlines data ingestion by processing multiple Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) topics in parallel while providing data quality and scalability through change data capture (CDC) and Apache Hudi.

With Amazon Redshift Serverless queue-based Query Monitoring Rules (QMR), administrators can define workload-aware thresholds and automated actions at the queue level—a significant improvement over previous workgroup-level monitoring. You can create dedicated queues for distinct workloads such as BI reporting, ad hoc analysis, or data engineering, then apply queue-specific rules to automatically abort, log, or restrict queries that exceed execution-time or resource-consumption limits. By isolating workloads and enforcing targeted controls, this approach protects mission-critical queries, improves performance predictability, and prevents resource monopolization—all while maintaining the flexibility of a serverless experience. In this post, we discuss how you can implement your workloads with query queues in Redshift Serverless.

In this post, we show how Slack built a monitoring framework for Apache Spark on Amazon EMR that captures over 40 metrics, processes them through Kafka and Apache Iceberg, and uses Amazon Bedrock to deliver AI-powered tuning recommendations—achieving 30–50% cost reductions and 40–60% faster job completion times.

AWS has introduced a new catalog federation feature that enables direct access to Snowflake Horizon Catalog data through AWS Glue Data Catalog. This integration allows organizations to discover and query data in Iceberg format while maintaining security through AWS Lake Formation. This post provides a step-by-step guide to establishing this integration, including configuring Snowflake Horizon Catalog, setting up authentication, creating necessary IAM roles, and implementing AWS Lake Formation permissions. Learn how to enable cross-platform analytics while maintaining robust security and governance across your data environment.

Over time, several distinct lakehouse approaches have emerged. In this post, we show you how to evaluate and choose the right lakehouse pattern for your needs. A lakehouse architecture isn’t about choosing between a data lake and a data warehouse. Instead, it’s an approach to interoperability where both frameworks coexist and serve different purposes within a unified data architecture. By understanding fundamental storage patterns, implementing effective catalog strategies, and using native storage capabilities, you can build scalable, high-performance data architectures that support both your current analytics needs and future innovation.

AWS has launched the catalog federation capability, enabling direct access to Apache Iceberg tables managed in Databricks Unity Catalog through the AWS Glue Data Catalog. With this integration, you can discover and query Unity Catalog data in Iceberg format using an Iceberg REST API endpoint, while maintaining granular access controls through AWS Lake Formation. In this post, we demonstrate how to set up catalog federation between the Glue Data Catalog and Databricks Unity Catalog, enabling data querying using AWS analytics services.

Amazon SageMaker announced a new feature that you can use to add custom tags to resources created through an Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio project. This helps you enforce tagging standards that conform to your organization’s service control policies (SCPs) and helps enable cost tracking reporting practices on resources created across the organization. In this post, we look at use cases for custom tags and how to use the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) to add tags to project resources.

In this post, we demonstrate how to use cross-account IAM definer roles with AWS Glue Data Catalog views. We show how data owner accounts can create and manage views in a central governance account while maintaining security and control over their data assets.