A Glue development endpoint provides a temporary, interactive environment within AWS Glue for developing, testing, and debugging your data transformation and machine learning (ML) code. Think of them as a way to get your ETL and ML scripts working before moving them into a production setting.
Key Purposes
- Iterative Development: They promote rapid experimentation with your Glue jobs. You can write Python or PySpark code, run it for testing, and get near-immediate feedback, without needing to provision the resources required for a full-scale production ETL process.
- Debugging: Development endpoints simplify the process of troubleshooting issues in your code and data transformations, enabling you to quickly identify and fix errors.
- Prototyping: They serve as a space to experiment and test new ideas or potential machine learning models before deploying them into larger workflows.
How to Use Development Endpoints
- Create an Endpoint: From the AWS Glue console, you can create a development endpoint, specifying the desired capacity (measured in DPUs – Data Processing Units)
- Connect to the Endpoint: AWS Glue provides options to connect to the endpoint using:
- AWS Glue Studio: A visual editor within the service.
- SageMaker Notebooks: For a more complete notebook experience
- IDEs: Using libraries for interactive shell sessions (e.g., PyCharm)
- Develop & Test: Write your ETL or ML code in your chosen environment and interactively execute snippets against the development endpoint.
- Terminate: When done, terminate the endpoint to avoid incurring ongoing costs. Importantly, code developed on an endpoint is not persisted.
Key Considerations
- Cost: While useful, development endpoints accrue charges based on run time and chosen DPU capacity. Manage this carefully.
- Timeouts: Development endpoints are not for long-running processes. They have time limits to prevent runaway costs.
- Not for Production: They are development environments; code running successfully needs to be transitioned onto production-scale Glue jobs.