What is AWS Data Pipeline?

AWS Data Pipeline is a web service that you can use to automate the movement and transformation of data. With AWS Data Pipeline, you can define data-driven workflows, so that tasks can be dependent on the successful completion of previous tasks.

For example, you can use AWS Data Pipeline to archive your web server's logs to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) each day and then run a weekly Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR) job flow over those logs to generate traffic reports.

In this example, AWS Data Pipeline would schedule the daily tasks to copy data and the weekly task to launch the Amazon EMR job flow. AWS Data Pipeline would also ensure that Amazon EMR waits for the final day's data to be uploaded to Amazon S3 before it began its analysis, even if there is an unforeseen delay in uploading the logs.

AWS Data Pipeline handles the ambiguities of real-world data management. You define the parameters of your data transformations and AWS Data Pipeline enforces the logic that you've set up.