In this day and age, data is everything. Your cloud infrastructure, environment setup, the security you have in place—all of it revolves around working with and protecting the precious data you have.
For businesses, data can come from various sources; it can be raw, structured, unstructured, etc. All of this data has value, or at least potential value, and many storage solutions exist to accommodate it. In this article, we’re going to look at a somewhat new storage solution called a data lake. We’ll also discuss AWS Lake Formation, a cloud service designed specifically for creating and working with data lakes.
Data Lakes: What They Are and Why We Need Them
Many of you have probably never heard of the term “data lake,” so let’s start by explaining what it is. A data lake represents a kind of centralized data repository, where you can store all of your data (whether structured or unstructured) at almost any scale. This data can later be used for analytics, machine learning, big data processing, visualization, etc.