AWS Lake Formation is a service by Amazon that makes it easy to set up secure data lakes, accelerating the process from months to mere weeks. Data lakes are centralized, curated, and secured repositories of data that can be stored and analyzed to guide business decisions and procure insights. Usually the set up of these data lakes involve a large amount of manual work that can be complicated and time-intensive. AWS Lake Formation simplifies this process down to just defining data sources and the data access and security policies that you want to apply.
The State of Data Today
The amount of data that is generated and utilized by businesses has been growing at a tremendous scale. The growth in the amount of data has catalyzed the research and development of new purposes and use cases, further driving up the sheer amount of data that is generated. In fact, data grows by 10x every 5 years and hence data platforms need to scale 1000x to be sufficient for 15 years of storage and processing requirements.
Data varieties and volumes are increasing quickly with a plethora of use cases ranging from feeding machine learning (ML) algorithms developed by Data Scientists to building statistical visualizations and using the generated insights to guide business decisions. Data can be used to anticipate customer behaviour, make a variety of predictions or forecasts, automate processes to improve efficiency and enhance product offerings with speed and availability in addition to automating customer service. These use cases require that the data is secure and available in real-time, and with growing numbers of people accessing data, it is important that data platforms are flexible and scalable.
Enter Data Lakes
Current solutions to on-prem data storage and analytics involve Hadoop Clusters, Data Warehouse Appliances and SQL Databases. These are siloed however and have minimal communication amongst each other in addition to having scalability limitations. Data Lakes offered on cloud platforms are a superior solution to meet the demands of data today and in the future, as it grows at a rapid pace.
As centralized repositories of data, data lakes allow the storage of structured and unstructured data at any scale. Amazon S3, an object storage service offered by AWS, is an industry-leading scalable, available, secure and high-performance platform upon which you can build data lakes. A large number of Fortune 500 companies and enterprise companies utilize Amazon S3 for their data lakes including Pfizer, Vanguard, Electronic Arts, Adobe, HBO, Expedia and many more. These companies choose to take advantage of data lakes for their flexibility to support relational and non-relational data, the ability to scale to any size, diverse set of analytics and ML tools, high availability and low cost.
