Connecting to the Data Catalog using AWS Glue Iceberg REST endpoint

AWS Glue's Iceberg REST endpoint supports API operations specified in the Apache Iceberg REST specification. Using an Iceberg REST client, you can connect your application running on an analytics engine to the REST catalog hosted in the Data Catalog.

The endpoint supports both Apache Iceberg table specifications - v1 and v2, defaulting to v2. When using the Iceberg table v1 specification, you must specify v1 in the API call. Using the API operation, you can access Iceberg tables stored in both Amazon S3 object storage and Amazon S3 Table storage.

Endpoint configuration

You can access the AWS Glue Iceberg REST catalog using the service endpoint. Refer to the AWS Glue service endpoints reference guide for the region-specific endpoint. For example, when connecting to AWS Glue in the us-east-1 Region, you need to configure the endpoint URI property as follows:

Endpoint : https://glue.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/iceberg

Additional configuration properties – When using Iceberg client to connect an analytics engine like Spark to the service endpoint, you are required to specify the following application configuration properties:

catalog_name = "mydatacatalog"
aws_account_id = "123456789012"
aws_region = "us-east-1"
spark = SparkSession.builder \
    ... \
    .config("spark.sql.defaultCatalog", catalog_name) \
    .config(f"spark.sql.catalog.{catalog_name}", "org.apache.iceberg.spark.SparkCatalog") \
    .config(f"spark.sql.catalog.{catalog_name}.type", "rest") \
    .config(f"spark.sql.catalog.{catalog_name}.uri", "https://glue.{aws_region}.amazonaws.com/iceberg") \
    .config(f"spark.sql.catalog.{catalog_name}.warehouse", "{aws_account_id}") \
    .config(f"spark.sql.catalog.{catalog_name}.rest.sigv4-enabled", "true") \
    .config(f"spark.sql.catalog.{catalog_name}.rest.signing-name", "glue") \    
    .config("spark.sql.extensions","org.apache.iceberg.spark.extensions.IcebergSparkSessionExtensions") \
    .getOrCreate()
     

AWS Glue Iceberg endpoint https://glue.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/iceberg supports supports the following Iceberg REST APIs:

• GetConfig

• ListNamespaces

• CreateNamespace

• LoadNamespaceMetadata

• UpdateNamespaceProperties

• DeleteNamespace

• ListTables

• CreateTable

• LoadTable

• TableExists

• UpdateTable

• DeleteTable

Prefix and catalog path parameters

Iceberg REST catalog APIs have a free-form prefix in their request URLs. For example, the ListNamespaces API call uses the GET/v1/{prefix}/namespaces URL format. AWS Glue prefix always follows the /catalogs/{catalog} structure to ensure that the REST path aligns the AWS Glue multi-catalog hierarchy. The {catalog} path parameter can be derived based on the following rules:

Access pattern	Glue catalog ID Style	Prefix Style	Example default catalog ID	Example REST route
Access the default catalog in current account	not required	:	not applicable	GET /v1/catalogs/:/namespaces
Access the default catalog in a specific account	accountID	accountID	111122223333	GET /v1/catalogs/111122223333/namespaces
Access a nested catalog in current account	catalog1/catalog2	catalog1/catalog2	rmscatalog1:db1	GET /v1/catalogs/rmscatalog1:db1/namespaces
Access a nested catalog in a specific account	accountId:catalog1/catalog2	accountId:catalog1/catalog2	123456789012/rmscatalog1:db1	GET /v1/catalogs/123456789012:rmscatalog1:db1/namespaces

This catalog ID to prefix mapping is required only when you directly call the REST APIs. When you are working with the AWS Glue Iceberg REST catalog APIs through an engine, you need to specify the AWS Glue catalog ID in the warehouse parameter for your Iceberg REST catalog API setting or in the glue.id parameter for your AWS Glue extensions API setting. For example, see how you can use it with EMR Spark in Use an Iceberg cluster with Spark.

Namespace path parameter

Namespaces in Iceberg REST catalog APIs path can have multiple levels. However, AWS Glue only supports single-level namespaces. To access a namespace in a multi-level catalog hierarchy, you can connect to a multi-level catalog above the namespace to reference the namespace. This allows any query engine that supports the 3-part notation of catalog.namespace.table to access objects in AWS Glue’s multi-level catalog hierarchy without compatibility issues compared to using the multi-level namespace.