AWS Lake Formation is a service by Amazon that simplifies the building, securing and managing of Data Lakes, speeding up the process from months to just weeks. A Data Lake is a centralized repository that allows you to store all your structured and unstructured data at any scale. You can store your data as-is, without having to first structure the data, and run different types of analytics—from dashboards and visualizations to big data processing, real-time analytics, and machine learning to guide better decisions.