Summary

In this chapter, you learned what AWS Glue and AWS Lake Formation provide when building and maintaining data lakes on AWS. We then focused on Lake Formation's ability to provide fine-grained access controls and the benefits and limitations of this. We also went through a sample process of enabling Lake Formation access controls for a new database and how it works within Athena. Lastly, we touched on Lake Formation governed tables, what they are, and how they can solve many issues with storing datasets on a distributed filesystem. There are more advanced features of Lake Formation, and we will dive deeper into governed tables in Chapter 14, Lake Formation – Advanced Topics.

In the next part of this book, we will get our hands dirty by using Amazon Athena in various settings ranging from ad hoc data analysis, using Athena to build ETL pipelines, and building applications that use Athena. We'll also take some time to cover how you can troubleshoot and tune...