Pipe input mode is a feature of Amazon SageMaker that allows streaming large datasets from Amazon S3 directly to the training algorithm without downloading them to the local disk. This reduces the startup time, disk space, and cost of training jobs. Pipe input mode is supported by most of the built-in algorithms and can also be used with custom training algorithms. To use Pipe input mode, the data needs to be in a binary format such as protobuf recordIO or TFRecord. The training code needs to use the PipeModeDataset class to read the data from the named pipe provided by SageMaker. To verify that the training code and the model parameters are working as expected, it is recommended to train locally on a smaller subset of the data before launching a full-scale training job on SageMaker. This approach is faster and more efficient than the other options, which involve either downloading the full dataset to an EC2 instance or using AWS Glue, which is not designed for training machine learning models. References:

Using Pipe input mode for Amazon SageMaker algorithms

Using Pipe Mode with Your Own Algorithms

PipeModeDataset Class