JSON Schema to AWS Glue schema converter

Installation

pip install git+https://github.com/nanit/j2g.git

What?

Converts pydantic schemas to json schema and then to AWS glue schema, so in theory anything that can be converted to JSON Schema could also work.

Why?

When using AWS Kinesis Firehose in a configuration that receives JSONs and writes parquet files on S3, one needs to define a AWS Glue table so Firehose knows what schema to use when creating the parquet files.

AWS Glue let's you define a schema using Avro or JSON Schema and then to create a table from that schema, but as of *May 2022` there's a limitations on AWS that tables that are created that way can't be used with Kinesis Firehose.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/68125501/invalid-schema-error-in-aws-glue-created-via-terraform

This is also confirmed by AWS support.

What one could do is create a table set the columns manually, but this means you now have two sources of truth to maintain.

This tool allows you to define a table in pydantic and generate a JSON with column types that can be used with terraform to create a Glue table.

Example

Take the following pydantic class

from pydantic import BaseModel
from typing import List

class Bar(BaseModel):
    name: str
    age: int

class Foo(BaseModel):
    nums: List[int]
    bars: List[Bar]
    other: str

Running j2g

python j2g example.py Foo

you get this JSON

{
  "//": "Generated by j2g at 2022-05-25 12:35:55.333570. DO NOT EDIT",
  "columns": {
    "nums": "array<int>",
    "bars": "array<struct<name:string,age:int>>",
    "other": "string"
  }
}

and can be used in terraform like that

locals {
  columns = jsondecode(file("${path.module}/glue_schema.json")).columns
}

resource "aws_glue_catalog_table" "table" {
  name          = "table_name"
  database_name = "db_name"

  storage_descriptor {
    dynamic "columns" {
      for_each = local.columns

      content {
        name = columns.key
        type = columns.value
      }
    }
  }
}

How it works?

• pydantic gets converted to JSON Schema
• the JSON Schema types get mapped to Glue types recursively

Future work

• Not all types are supported, I just add types as I need them, but adding types is very easy, feel free to open issues or send a PR if you stumbled upon an non-supported use case
• the tool could be easily extended to working with JSON Schema directly
• thus anything that can be converted to a JSON Schema should also work.