Planetary-scale answers, unlocked.
A Hands-On Guide for Working with Large-Scale Spatial Data. Learn more.
Authors
AWS Glue Data Catalog (GDC) customers use it to manage structured data, like user activity and revenue reports, and complex geospatial data, like parcels, buildings, and mobility datasets. AWS services like EMR, Redshift, and Athena excel at processing the former, while Wherobots is purpose-built for the latter. AWS customers have standardized tooling, governance, and processes around the GDC, which they do not want to replicate on another catalog. Having to manage two catalogs introduces friction and slows down innovation.
Today, Wherobots addresses this friction by making it easier for customers to use the best spatial data tool for the job while maintaining their governance layer in the AWS GDC. Using IAM policies, customers can now federate access between the AWS Glue Data Catalog and Wherobots. Wherobots will handle reading geospatial data from that catalog, processing it and writing it back to it, while Glue continues to act as the central catalog.
For instance, consider a national e-commerce retailer coordinating just-in-time restocking across regional distribution centers. The workflow:
Trino, Postgres, and Spark are battle-tested engines, but they were not designed for what spatial data demands, such as coordinate reference systems (CRS), mixed raster and vector formats, and joins across billions of geometries.
Built by the original creators of Apache Sedona and 100% code compatible across all spatial functions, WherobotsDB handles the spatial workloads that stall on general-purpose engines. With RasterFlow, this power extends to Earth Observation, enabling planetary-scale mosaicking and AI inference pipelines alongside high-performance vector analytics. Customers can also take advantage of Wherobots’ Spatial AI tools to get insights from spatial data in minutes using natural language, with little to no prior geospatial expertise. Open table formats and catalog services like AWS Glue Data Catalog remove the tradeoff: your governance, tooling, and data stay in Glue, while the engine built for spatial data does the spatial work.
Regrid, uses Wherobots to provide comprehensive parcel data with boundaries, buildings, addresses, and geographic enrichments for all your location decisions.
"We made a deliberate decision to standardize on AWS. The expertise and experience Wherobots bring to helping us navigate and architect the transition of 4,000+ geospatial pipelines to a highly scalable and efficient cloud native processing workflow has been invaluable to the success of our project. Wherobots is creating the future of cloud geospatial processing." Blake Girardot Senior Data Engineer at Regrid
Senior Data Engineer at Regrid
Integrate Wherobots with your AWS Glue Data Catalog securely using AWS IAM in a few minutes, and run your first workloads on the Professional free trial: 14 days or $95 in credits, whichever comes first.
We also offer hands-on spatial expertise to help you move your ideas and initiatives into production faster. We deliver this through the Wherobots Innovation Edition, which you can subscribe to by reaching out to us.
Key takeaways
Customers federate access between Glue Data Catalog and Wherobots using IAM policies. Wherobots handles reading geospatial data from that catalog, processing it, and writing it back. Glue continues to act as the central catalog, so AWS-standard tooling, governance, and processes stay in place.
EMR, Redshift, and Athena excel at structured data such as user activity and revenue reports. Wherobots is purpose-built for geospatial data such as parcels, buildings, and mobility datasets. Trino, Postgres, and Spark were not designed for CRS, mixed raster and vector formats, and joins across billions of geometries.
Yes. In the retail restocking example, Wherobots calculates a route disruption score for each corridor and writes it to a federated Glue table. Supply-chain teams then pull that score into EMR restocking pipelines to trigger early shipments or reroute orders.
Integrate Wherobots with your AWS Glue Data Catalog using AWS IAM in a few minutes, and run first workloads on the Professional free trial: 14 days or $95 in credits, whichever comes first. Hands-on spatial expertise is also available through the Wherobots Innovation Edition.
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