Summary

In this chapter, we concluded our exploration of Athena by looking at upcoming Lake Formation features. AWS is increasingly positioning Lake Formation as their one-stop shop for data lake creation and management. If they succeed in making Lake Formation a foundational component of AWS data lakes, customers could expect increased interoperability across the various AWS analytics engines.

It may not be the flashiest feature, but we expect to see many applications mimic Lake Formation's new security features. Using dedicated data access APIs to decouple policy enforcement from workload execution is like an easy button for reducing your attack surface. The addition of ACID transactions with the new governed table type will open a host of new possibilities such as time travel. Look for these features to reach general availability in late 2021.

If you'd like to learn more, consult the Further reading section and consider signing up for the public preview of these...