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AWS Certified Data Engineer - Associate · AWS
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AWS Glue Python Shell jobs are designed for lightweight, small-to-medium workloads. They run with a very small minimum allocation: 0.0625 DPU (1/16 DPU) by default (up to 1 DPU). This makes them significantly cheaper than Spark-based options. Pandas is perfect for handling CSV files of this size (easily fits in memory on a single node). Fully serverless — you pay only for the short duration the job runs (billed per second, 1-minute minimum). No infrastructure to manage or idle costs.
Spark, EKS, and EMR all cost more significantly than running Python!
It is important not to compare just the “price per DPU hour,” but to consider the total cost by factoring in overhead for job startup, minimum DPU count, execution time, and data volume. For a relatively lightweight workload—such as processing approximately 100 MB of CSV files on a daily basis—option (D), using an AWS Glue Python shell job, is the most cost-effective choice.