AWS Lake Formation is now generally available
AWS Lake Formation is a service that makes it easy to set up a secure data lake in days. A data lake is a centralized, curated, and secured repository that stores all your data, both in its original form and prepared for analysis. A data lake enables you to break down data silos and combine different types of analytics to gain insights and guide better business decisions.
However, setting up and managing data lakes today involves a lot of manual, complicated, and time-consuming tasks. This work includes loading data from diverse sources, monitoring those data flows, setting up partitions, turning on encryption and managing keys, defining transformation jobs and monitoring their operation, re-organizing data into a columnar format, configuring access control settings, using machine learning to identify approximate duplicates and matching records across data sets, granting access to data sets, and auditing access over time.
Creating a data lake with AWS Lake Formation is as simple as defining where your data resides and what data access and security policies you want to apply. AWS Lake Formation then collects and catalogs data from databases and object storage, moves the data into your new Amazon S3 data lake, cleans and classifies data using machine learning algorithms, and secures access to your sensitive data. Your users can then access a centralized catalog of data which describes available data sets and their appropriate usage. Your users then leverage these data sets with their choice of analytics and machine learning services, like Amazon EMR for Apache Spark, Amazon Redshift Spectrum, and Amazon Athena.
AWS Lake Formation is available in the US East (Northern Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), EU (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) AWS regions. To see all the regions AWS Lake Formation is available in, visit the AWS Region page. Get started with AWS Lake Formation by visiting the AWS Lake Formation console.