AWS Glue 6.0 now available with 30% lower price and full Apache Iceberg v3 support

This article announces the general availability of AWS Glue 6.0, delivering 30% lower pricing and full Apache Iceberg v3 support with a modernized runtime.

• VARIANT data type with shredding for faster semi-structured data queries without schema flattening
• Geometry, Geography data types, and nanosecond-precision timestamps for spatial and IoT workloads
• Spark Declarative Pipelines simplify ETL authoring by automatically determining execution order
• Arrow-native Python UDFs and UDTFs eliminate serialization overhead for improved PySpark performance
• Real-time streaming mode achieves single-digit millisecond latency for event processing
• Built on Apache Spark 4.1, Python 3.12, and Scala 2.13 for faster performance
• No API changes required; select version via --glue-version parameter or AWS Glue Studio console

AWS Glue 6.0 provides the most complete Iceberg v3 implementation on any fully serverless managed Spark service, available in all AWS Regions.