Modern Data Architecture on AWS

Before we dive deep into the actual data and analytics use cases and how to design and build them, let’s address the elephant in the room—what is a modern data architecture, and why build it on Amazon Web Services (AWS)?

One of the fundamental tenets of a modern data architecture on AWS is to seamlessly integrate your data lake, data warehouse, and purpose-built data stores. In the previous prologue, we looked at what a data warehouse is and what it does. We also looked at the data tier in a three-tier architecture, typically referred to as a relational database management system (RDBMS) and considered a type of purpose-built store. The type of system we haven’t really explored in much detail yet is the data lake. The next chapter is completely dedicated to data lakes, but before we go any further in this chapter, it is important to get some context around the need for data lakes in the first place.

In this chapter, we will...