AWS Glue vs S3 Tables: How Two Iceberg REST Catalogs Differ in Practice
AWS offers two managed Apache Iceberg REST catalog implementations — AWS Glue and Amazon S3 Tables — both SigV4-signed and built to the same open specification. A developer ran a Python-based probe harness against both services on September 3, 2026, testing 25 of the 35 operations defined in the Iceberg REST catalog spec. Despite identical specification scores, the two catalogs diverge in 13 measurable behaviors, including different endpoints, SigV4 signing names, and warehouse identifiers. The investigation also highlighted a common pitfall: SigV4 requires the URL to be built and signed as one unit, since re-encoding query parameters separately causes a 403 signature mismatch. The full test harness and raw response evidence have been published on GitHub for independent review.
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