Amazon S3 Tables
Apache Iceberg tables on S3
A bucket type dedicated to storing tabular data in the Apache Iceberg format (table bucket), with automatic maintenance such as merging small files (compaction) and cleaning up snapshots; query with Athena, EMR, Redshift, Spark…
- Cost$ Low
- Difficulty●●●●●
- Costs money when idle?A little
- Serverless
Think of it asLike a warehouse with numbered shelves and someone who rearranges the goods every night, instead of dumping goods into an empty warehouse.
When to use it
✓ Use it when
Building an Iceberg-table data lake/lakehouse without handling table maintenance yourself.
✗ Avoid it when
Storing ordinary files/objects → S3; need a data warehouse for constant fast queries → Redshift.
Common uses
- Iceberg lakehouse for analytics
- Storing transaction data and logs as tables
- Querying the same table from multiple engines
What does it cost?
- Pricing model: Charged per GB-month stored, requests, number of monitored objects and the amount of data processed during compaction.
