Serverless Data Lake Analytics with AWS Glue, S3 & Athena

Part 8: Hands-on Tutorials · Hands-on Tutorials

Read the full tutorial: Serverless Data Lake Analytics with AWS Glue, S3 & Athena ↗

Link verified 2026-08-23.

This tutorial builds the smallest complete version of a lake: land raw files in S3, point a Glue crawler at the bucket to infer schema into the Glue Data Catalog, trigger an ETL job to clean and repartition the data, and query the result straight from Athena with no cluster to manage.

It’s the practical, click-by-click counterpart to Storage Foundations: Object Storage, File Formats & Access Patterns — the same object-storage-plus-file-format decisions covered there (partitioning, columnar formats, the small-files problem) show up here as real S3 prefixes and real crawler configuration, not just diagrams.

flowchart LR
    A[Raw files in S3] --> B[Glue Crawler]
    B --> C[Glue Data Catalog]
    C --> D[Glue ETL Job]
    D --> E[Curated S3 - Parquet]
    E --> C
    C --> F[Athena SQL queries]

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