Compare AWS Lake Formation vs. BigLake

AWS Lake Formation is a service designed to streamline the creation of a secure data lake in just a matter of days. A data lake serves as a centralized, carefully organized, and protected repository that accommodates all data, maintaining both its raw and processed formats for analytical purposes. By utilizing a data lake, organizations can eliminate data silos and integrate various analytical approaches, leading to deeper insights and more informed business choices. However, the traditional process of establishing and maintaining data lakes is often burdened with labor-intensive, complex, and time-consuming tasks. This includes activities such as importing data from various sources, overseeing data flows, configuring partitions, enabling encryption and managing encryption keys, defining and monitoring transformation jobs, reorganizing data into a columnar structure, removing duplicate records, and linking related entries. After data is successfully loaded into the data lake, it is essential to implement precise access controls for datasets and continuously monitor access across a broad spectrum of analytics and machine learning tools and services. The comprehensive management of these tasks can significantly enhance the overall efficiency and security of data handling within an organization.

BigLake serves as a storage engine that merges the functionalities of data warehouses and lakes, allowing BigQuery and open-source frameworks like Spark to efficiently access data while enforcing detailed access controls. It enhances query performance across various multi-cloud storage systems and supports open formats, including Apache Iceberg. Users can maintain a single version of data, ensuring consistent features across both data warehouses and lakes. With its capacity for fine-grained access management and comprehensive governance over distributed data, BigLake seamlessly integrates with open-source analytics tools and embraces open data formats. This solution empowers users to conduct analytics on distributed data, regardless of its storage location or method, while selecting the most suitable analytics tools, whether they be open-source or cloud-native, all based on a singular data copy. Additionally, it offers fine-grained access control for open-source engines such as Apache Spark, Presto, and Trino, along with formats like Parquet. As a result, users can execute high-performing queries on data lakes driven by BigQuery. Furthermore, BigLake collaborates with Dataplex, facilitating scalable management and logical organization of data assets. This integration not only enhances operational efficiency but also simplifies the complexities of data governance in large-scale environments.