Reinforcing your data perimeter with Lake Formation

We were first introduced to AWS Lake Formation in Chapter 3, Key Features, Query Types, and Functions, where we explored Lake Formation's ability to go beyond S3 object-level IAM policies to offer fine-grained access control for tables. While security is a focal point for the Lake Formation product, you may not realize that its ambitions extend far beyond this one essential element of data lakes. As we will see later in this chapter, Lake Formation's mandate is to make every aspect of building and managing data lakes simpler, faster, and cheaper. This has led the Lake Formation team to focus on the most frustrating parts of operating a data lake, such as access control.

Before discussing the most significant changes to Lake Formation since it went GA in 2019, let's make sure we genuinely understand how things worked before these new features. The following diagram illustrates the high-level interactions between...