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AWS Lake Formation

What is it​

A service that makes it easy to set up, secure, and manage data lakes on AWS.

What it's for​

Simplify governance, security, and data sharing in data lakes for analytics and machine learning.

Use cases​

  • Building secure and scalable data lakes
  • Centralized management of data access permissions in data lakes
  • Data cleaning and transformation for data lakes
  • Secure data sharing between different AWS accounts or organizations

Key points​

  • Centralized governance: Manages data access permissions in a single location
  • Granular security: Allows defining permissions at table, column, and row level
  • AWS Glue integration: Uses AWS Glue Data Catalog for metadata
  • Simplifies data lake building: Automates many of the manual tasks involved in creating a data lake
  • Audit: Provides audit logs to track data access

Comparison​

  • AWS Lake Formation vs. S3 (direct): While S3 is the fundamental storage for data lakes, Lake Formation adds a layer of governance and security that simplifies permission management and data access at scale, something that would be complex to implement manually with just S3.