What are the limitations and advantages of AWS Lambda compared to AWS Glue?

AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service that automatically scales based on the number of events it receives. Its advantages include zero server management, pay‑per‑execution billing, rapid deployment, and tight integration with many AWS services. However, Lambda has several limitations that make it less suitable for large‑scale ETL tasks that Glue is designed for. The maximum execution timeout is 15 minutes, memory can be increased only up to 10 GB, and the deployment package size is limited to 50 MB (zipped) or 250 MB (unzipped). Lambda functions are stateless and do not provide a built‑in data catalog, job scheduling, or automatic schema discovery. Glue, on the other hand, offers a managed ETL engine, automatic job orchestration, a data catalog, and the ability to run jobs that process petabytes of data over hours or days. Therefore, Lambda is ideal for lightweight, event‑driven transformations, while Glue excels at large, complex data pipelines.