Which AWS service provides a central metadata repository to catalog and search data lake assets?

• A. AWS Glue Data Catalog
• B. Amazon CloudFront
• C. AWS Secrets Manager
• D. Amazon QuickSight

Answer: (A)

A central metadata repository for data lake assets is provided by AWS Glue Data Catalog. It stores metadata about data stored in S3—such as table definitions, schemas, partitions, and data locations—so analytics services can discover and query data without redriving metadata. Crawlers scan data in S3, infer schemas, and populate the catalog, creating a unified view of all data assets. This catalog is used by services like Amazon Athena, Amazon Redshift Spectrum, and AWS Glue ETL jobs to locate and interpret data efficiently.

The other options don’t serve this purpose: CloudFront is a content delivery network for distributing static and dynamic content; Secrets Manager stores and retrieves secrets like credentials; QuickSight is a business intelligence tool for visualization and analysis.