title: AWS Data Pipeline vs Step Functions
body: <p>I am working on a problem where we intend to perform multiple transformations on data using EMR (SparkSQL). </p>
  
  <p>After going through the documentation of AWS Data Pipelines and AWS Step Functions, I am slightly confused as to what is the use-case each tries to solve. I looked around but did not find a authoritative comparison between both. There are multiple resources that show how I can use them both to schedule and trigger Spark jobs on an EMR cluster.</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li><p><strong>Which one should I use for scheduling and orchestrating my processing EMR jobs?</strong></p></li>
  <li><p><strong>More generally, in what situation would one be a better choice over the other as far as ETL/data processing is concerned?</strong></p></li>
  </ol>