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AWS Lake Formation icon (AWS Architecture Icons)

AWS Lake Formation

Data lake permission governance

Build and secure data lakes on S3: centralized, fine-grained permission management down to the database, table, column, and row level for Athena, Redshift Spectrum, EMR, and Glue.

  • Cost$ Low
  • Difficulty●●●●●
  • Costs money when idle?No
  • Serverless
  • In examsSAA

Scope: Regional

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Think of it asLike a library guard with a list of who may read which shelf and which page.

When to use it

✓ Use it when

Multi-user data lakes that need fine-grained permissions and cross-account data sharing.

✗ Avoid it when

Only need simple bucket-level permissions → S3 bucket policy / IAM.

Common uses

  • Column-level permissions for sensitive data
  • Share tables across accounts
  • Apply tag-based access control to a data lake

What does it cost?

  • Pricing model: No separate charge for permission management; underlying services (Glue, S3, Athena) are billed normally.

Reference prices for us-east-1, updated October 14, 2026; they may have changed. Always check the AWS pricing page.

Related services

SAA-C03 study guide

Lake Formation is covered in these study modules:

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