What is AWS Lake Formation?

We’re seeing more companies move to the data lake because it’s flexible, cheaper, and much easier to use than a data warehouse. You’re not locked into proprietary formats, nor do you have to ingest all of your data into a proprietary technology.

As more companies are leveraging the data lake, security becomes even more important because you have more people needing access to that data and you want to be able to control who sees what.

AWS Lake Formation can help address security on the data lake. For Amazon S3 users, it’s a seamless integration that enables you to put granular security policies in place on your data. AWS Lake Formation gives you three key capabilities:

1. Build data lakes quickly: This means days, not months. You can move, store, update and catalog your data faster, plus automatically organize and optimize your data.

2. Simplify security management: You can centrally define and enforce security, governance, and auditing policies.

3.Make data easy to discover and share: Catalog all of your company’s data assets and easily share datasets between consumers.

If you’re currently using AWS S3 or planning to, we recommend looking at AWS Lake Formation as an easy way to get security policies in place on your data lake. As part of your stack, you’ll also need a query engine that will enable you to get analytics on your data lake. The most popular engine to do that is Presto, an open-source SQL query engine built for the data lake.

We’ve made it easy to get started with this stack: AWS S3 + Presto + AWS Lake Formation. We provide SaaS for Presto with out-of-the-box integrations with S3 and Lake Formation, so you can get a full data lake analytics stack up and running in a matter of hours.