Which AWS service is designed to provide fine-grained access control and governance over data stored in a data lake?

• A. AWS Glue
• B. Amazon QuickSight
• C. AWS CloudFormation
• D. Lake Formation

Answer: (D)

Fine-grained access control and governance over a data lake is exactly what AWS Lake Formation provides. It gives you a centralized framework to define who can do what with data stored in your data lake, and it enforces those rules across the actual data in S3 as well as the metadata in the Glue Data Catalog. You can grant permissions at multiple levels—database, table, and even column or row level—so you can allow a user to see only specific columns or only rows that meet a given condition, while blocking access to everything else. This tight control is essential for protecting sensitive data and meeting governance requirements, and it’s integrated with the data catalog so discoverability and auditing align with your access policies. In practice, Lake Formation coordinates with IAM and S3 to apply these permissions consistently, covering both metadata and the underlying data.

AWS Glue focuses on ETL and cataloging, not centralized governance. QuickSight is a visualization and analytics service. CloudFormation is infrastructure-as-code for provisioning resources.