Native integration with AWS Glue Data Catalog with Fabric

[ahmedbna]

Many customers migrating from AWS to Microsoft Fabric use AWS Glue Data Catalog as their central metastore for data stored in Amazon S3. While Fabric supports accessing S3 data (for example, via shortcuts), it cannot consume or reuse Glue Data Catalog metadata.

As a result, customers must manually recreate databases, tables, schemas, and partitions in Fabric Lakehouse, even though this metadata already exists and is actively maintained in Glue.

Impact

• Increased migration effort and time

• Duplicate metadata management (Glue + Fabric)

• Higher risk of schema drift and inconsistencies

• Reduced value of shortcut-based migrations from S3

• Friction for hybrid or phased AWS - Fabric adoption

Customer Expectation

Customers expect Fabric to:

• Discover databases and tables already defined in Glue

• Reuse existing schemas and partition definitions

• Register Glue tables from S3 as Lakehouse tables without rebuilding metadata

Suggested Enhancement

• Native connector or integration with AWS Glue Data Catalog

• Ability to import or synchronize Glue metadata into Fabric Lakehouse

• Support for registering Glue-managed tables as external tables in Fabric

Business Value

• Significantly reduces AWS to Fabric migration friction

• Improves hybrid cloud and coexistence scenarios

• Makes Fabric more attractive to AWS-centric customers

• Aligns with Fabric’s goal of simplifying data lake interoperability