Building a Modern Data Lakehouse on AWS: S3, Iceberg, Glue, Athena, and Lake Formation

The data lakehouse has become the default architecture for analytics on AWS in 2026. It combines the best of both worlds: the low-cost, schema-flexible storage of a data lake (S3) with the performance, ACID transactions, and governance of a data warehouse — without actually running a warehouse for most workloads.

The enabling technology: Apache Iceberg — an open table format that brings SQL-like capabilities (INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, time travel) to files sitting in S3. Combined with AWS Glue for ETL, Athena for queries, and Lake Formation for governance, you get a complete analytics platform without managing servers.

Data Lake vs Data Warehouse vs Lakehouse

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│ DATA LAKE │ │ DATA WAREHOUSE │ │ DATA LAKEHOUSE │