AWS Lake Formation for management and security data lakes made generally available

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has made its Lake Formation service widely available. This is a fully managed service that allows you to build, secure and manage data lakes.

AWS Lake Formation was built to create and manage data lakes faster and easier, says Vice President Raju Gulabani of databases, analytics and machine learning at AWS to Venturebeat. He states that customers have specifically asked for this.

Lake Formation

Lake Formation automates a number of steps that need to be taken when creating a data lake. This includes, for example, the collection, cleaning, deduplication and cataloguing of data. The data must also be made available for analytics via supplied and configured storage.

With Lake Formation, customers can bring data from various sources to data lakes using pre-defined templates. Then it is possible to set up policies to manage access to the information by different groups in the organization. The data is also automatically classified and prepared.

With AWS Lake Formation, customers can spend more time learning their data and innovation, instead of making the effort to convert that data into functioning data lakes, says Gulabani.

Dashboard

AWS Lake Formation also has a centralized dashboard where administrators can manage access policies for the data, governance and auditing of multiple analytics engines.

The dashboard also offers a searchable catalogue that describes the various available datasets and their use. In the coming months, engineers can also use the service to analyze data in the datasets with the AWS analytics and machine learning services of their choice.

Although Lake Formation was announced in November last year, it is now widely available for customers with instances in the regions US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia). US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Tokyo) and Europe (Ireland).