Amazon DataZone
A data management portal that integrates data cataloging, access governance, and self-service data sharing
Overview
Amazon DataZone is a data management service for discovering, sharing, and governing data assets within an organization. It provides a portal accessible to both business users and data engineers, enabling self-service data search, access requests, and approval workflows. In addition to AWS data sources such as S3, Redshift, Glue Data Catalog, and RDS, it integrates third-party data sources, providing a unified catalog of data assets across the entire organization. Through integration with Lake Formation, it automatically applies fine-grained access controls at the table and column level.
Data Governance Through Domains and Projects
DataZone's governance structure is designed in three tiers: domains, projects, and environments. A domain is the top-level governance boundary, typically created per enterprise or business unit. Within a domain, the business data catalog, business glossary, and metadata forms are stored, forming the foundation for classifying and contextualizing data assets. Projects are created per team of data producers and consumers, managing membership and role-based access control. Environments are collections of technical resources tied to a project, defining connections to Redshift clusters, Athena workgroups, Glue databases, and more. Data owners publish data assets within a project, and members of other projects acquire access through subscription requests. When publishing, you can set whether subscriptions require approval; by default, a data owner must approve every subscription request.
Publishing Data Assets and Subscriptions
To share data in DataZone, you first register data sources and automatically collect metadata. When you connect the Glue Data Catalog or Redshift as a data source, technical metadata such as table names, column definitions, and data types is imported. Data owners enrich the ingested assets with business metadata (descriptions, business terms, metadata form fields, and more) and perform a Publish operation to make them searchable by other projects within the domain. Data consumers discover assets through the portal's search interface and submit subscription requests. Once approved, grants are created automatically in Lake Formation for Glue tables and in Redshift for Redshift tables and views, allowing consumers to query data directly from their project environment (Athena or Redshift). This end-to-end flow reduces the operational burden of data engineers manually configuring IAM policies and Lake Formation permissions.
Business Data Catalog and Search Experience
DataZone's business data catalog is a searchable inventory of data assets that integrates technical metadata with business context. Catalog search returns semantic matches in addition to keyword matches, so when business users search for terms like "monthly sales data" or "customer segments," relevant tables and datasets are surfaced. The business glossary feature lets you register organization-specific terminology (KPI definitions, metric calculation methods, data classification criteria, etc.) and link them to data assets, unifying the meaning and context of data across the organization. Metadata forms define custom fields, allowing you to attach attributes such as data freshness, update frequency, data owner, and sensitivity level to assets. Through integration with AWS Glue Data Quality, each asset's quality score is displayed in the catalog, enabling consumers to evaluate data reliability before use.
References (Official AWS Resources)
The primary sources for this page are the official AWS website and documentation. Check the official pages below for the latest specifications and pricing.
- AWS Lake Formation official page
- AWS Glue official page
- Amazon Redshift official page
- AWS Documentation (official)
If this page and the official documentation disagree, treat the official documentation as authoritative.