AWS Lake Formation
AWS Lake Formation is a service from Amazon Web Services that automates the complex manual steps needed to create, manage, and secure a data lake — a secure repository that stores data in its original form for analysis.
AI Practitioner focus
- Lake Formation centrally governs access to data-lake tables/columns/rows that may feed training, analytics, or RAG workloads; permissions are separate from data preparation/modeling.
- It builds on the AWS Glue Data Catalog and Amazon S3. Use it for governed sharing and least-privilege data access, not as an inference or model-training service.
Key points
- Points at data sources, then crawls them, catalogs the data, and moves it into a new Amazon S3 data lake, preparing it for you to perform analytics on (per AWS Terminology.xlsx).
- Integrates with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to provide fine-grained access to data stored in data lakes through a simple grant/revoke process.
- Shares the same Data Catalog as AWS Glue.
- Integrates with Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon CloudTrail, Amazon Redshift Spectrum, Amazon EMR, and AWS Key Management Service (KMS).
- Amazon Athena users can query the AWS Glue Data Catalog tables that have Lake Formation permissions applied to them.
Pricing
- Charged based on the service integrations used (AWS Glue, Amazon S3, Amazon EMR, Amazon Redshift) at a standard rate.