Many Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers require a data storage and analytics solution that offers more agility and flexibility than traditional data management systems. A data lake is a new and increasingly popular way to store and analyze data because it allows companies to manage multiple data types from a wide variety of sources, and store this data, structured and unstructured, in a centralized repository.
The AWS Cloud provides many of the building blocks required to help customers implement a secure, flexible, and cost-effective data lake. These include AWS managed services that help ingest, store, find, process, and analyze both structured and unstructured data. To support our customers as they build data lakes, AWS offers Data Lake on AWS, which deploys a highly available, cost-effective data lake architecture on the AWS Cloud along with a user-friendly console for searching and requesting datasets.
Overview
Data Lake on AWS automatically configures the core AWS services necessary to easily tag, search, share, transform, analyze, and govern specific subsets of data across a company or with other external users. The Guidance deploys a console that users can access to search and browse available datasets for their business needs. It also includes a federated template that allows you to launch a version of the solution that is ready to integrate with Microsoft Active Directory.
The diagram below presents the data lake architecture you can build using the example code on GitHub.
Data Lake on AWS architecture
The code configures a suite of AWS Lambda microservices (functions), Amazon OpenSearch Service for robust search capabilities, Amazon Cognito for user authentication, AWS Glue for data transformation, and Amazon Athena for analysis.
Data Lake on AWS leverages the security, durability, and scalability of Amazon S3 to manage a persistent catalog of organizational datasets, and Amazon DynamoDB to manage corresponding metadata. Once a dataset is cataloged, its attributes and descriptive tags are available to search on. Users can search and browse available datasets in the console, and create a list of data they require access to. It keeps track of the datasets a user selects and generates a manifest file with secure access links to the desired content when the user checks out.
Additional resources
Features
Data access flexibility
Managed storage layer
Federation sign-in
Command line interface
User interface
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