The AWS Glue Data Catalog is an Apache Hive metastore-compatible catalog that provides a central metadata repository for various data sources and formats. You can use the AWS Glue Data Catalog as an external Hive metastore for Amazon EMR and Amazon Athena queries, and import metadata from existing Hive metastores into the Data Catalog. This solution requires the least development effort, as you can use AWS Glue crawlers to automatically discover and catalog the metadata from Hive, and use the AWS Glue console, AWS CLI, or Amazon EMR API to configure the Data Catalog as the Hive metastore. The other options are either more complex or require additional steps, such as setting up Apache Ranger for security, managing a Hive metastore on an EMR cluster or an RDS instance, or migrating the metadata manually. References:

Using the AWS Glue Data Catalog as the metastore for Hive (Section: Specifying AWS Glue Data Catalog as the metastore)

Metadata Management: Hive Metastore vs AWS Glue (Section: AWS Glue Data Catalog)

AWS Glue Data Catalog support for Spark SQL jobs (Section: Importing metadata from an existing Hive metastore)

AWS Certified Data Engineer - Associate DEA-C01 Complete Study Guide (Chapter 5, page 131)