Tag Archives: Amazon DataZone

Amazon DataZone announces integration with AWS Lake Formation hybrid access mode for the AWS Glue Data Catalog

Post Syndicated from Utkarsh Mittal original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/amazon-datazone-announces-integration-with-aws-lake-formation-hybrid-access-mode-for-the-aws-glue-data-catalog/

Last week, we announced the general availability of the integration between Amazon DataZone and AWS Lake Formation hybrid access mode. In this post, we share how this new feature helps you simplify the way you use Amazon DataZone to enable secure and governed sharing of your data in the AWS Glue Data Catalog. We also delve into how data producers can share their AWS Glue tables through Amazon DataZone without needing to register them in Lake Formation first.

Overview of the Amazon DataZone integration with Lake Formation hybrid access mode

Amazon DataZone is a fully managed data management service to catalog, discover, analyze, share, and govern data between data producers and consumers in your organization. With Amazon DataZone, data producers populate the business data catalog with data assets from data sources such as the AWS Glue Data Catalog and Amazon Redshift. They also enrich their assets with business context to make it straightforward for data consumers to understand. After the data is available in the catalog, data consumers such as analysts and data scientists can search and access this data by requesting subscriptions. When the request is approved, Amazon DataZone can automatically provision access to the data by managing permissions in Lake Formation or Amazon Redshift so that the data consumer can start querying the data using tools such as Amazon Athena or Amazon Redshift.

To manage the access to data in the AWS Glue Data Catalog, Amazon DataZone uses Lake Formation. Previously, if you wanted to use Amazon DataZone for managing access to your data in the AWS Glue Data Catalog, you had to onboard your data to Lake Formation first. Now, the integration of Amazon DataZone and Lake Formation hybrid access mode simplifies how you can get started with your Amazon DataZone journey by removing the need to onboard your data to Lake Formation first.

Lake Formation hybrid access mode allows you to start managing permissions on your AWS Glue databases and tables through Lake Formation, while continuing to maintain any existing AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) permissions on these tables and databases. Lake Formation hybrid access mode supports two permission pathways to the same Data Catalog databases and tables:

  • In the first pathway, Lake Formation allows you to select specific principals (opt-in principals) and grant them Lake Formation permissions to access databases and tables by opting in
  • The second pathway allows all other principals (that are not added as opt-in principals) to access these resources through the IAM principal policies for Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and AWS Glue actions

With the integration between Amazon DataZone and Lake Formation hybrid access mode, if you have tables in the AWS Glue Data Catalog that are managed through IAM-based policies, you can publish these tables directly to Amazon DataZone, without registering them in Lake Formation. Amazon DataZone registers the location of these tables in Lake Formation using hybrid access mode, which allows managing permissions on AWS Glue tables through Lake Formation, while continuing to maintain any existing IAM permissions.

Amazon DataZone enables you to publish any type of asset in the business data catalog. For some of these assets, Amazon DataZone can automatically manage access grants. These assets are called managed assets, and include Lake Formation-managed Data Catalog tables and Amazon Redshift tables and views. Prior to this integration, you had to complete the following steps before Amazon DataZone could treat the published Data Catalog table as a managed asset:

  1. Identity the Amazon S3 location associated with Data Catalog table.
  2. Register the Amazon S3 location with Lake Formation in hybrid access mode using a role with appropriate permissions.
  3. Publish the table metadata to the Amazon DataZone business data catalog.

The following diagram illustrates this workflow.

With the Amazon DataZone’s integration with Lake Formation hybrid access mode, you can simply publish your AWS Glue tables to Amazon DataZone without having to worry about registering the Amazon S3 location or adding an opt-in principal in Lake Formation by delegating these steps to Amazon DataZone. The administrator of an AWS account can enable the data location registration setting under the DefaultDataLake blueprint on the Amazon DataZone console. Now, a data owner or publisher can publish their AWS Glue table (managed through IAM permissions) to Amazon DataZone without the extra setup steps. When a data consumer subscribes to this table, Amazon DataZone registers the Amazon S3 locations of the table in hybrid access mode, adds the data consumer’s IAM role as an opt-in principal, and grants access to the same IAM role by managing permissions on the table through Lake Formation. This makes sure that IAM permissions on the table can coexist with newly granted Lake Formation permissions, without disrupting any existing workflows. The following diagram illustrates this workflow.

Solution overview

To demonstrate this new capability, we use a sample customer scenario where the finance team wants to access data owned by the sales team for financial analysis and reporting. The sales team has a pipeline that creates a dataset containing valuable information about ticket sales, popular events, venues, and seasons. We call it the tickit dataset. The sales team stores this dataset in Amazon S3 and registers it in a database in the Data Catalog. The access to this table is currently managed through IAM-based permissions. However, the sales team wants to publish this table to Amazon DataZone to facilitate secure and governed data sharing with the finance team.

The steps to configure this solution are as follows:

  1. The Amazon DataZone administrator enables the data lake location registration setting in Amazon DataZone to automatically register the Amazon S3 location of the AWS Glue tables in Lake Formation hybrid access mode.
  2. After the hybrid access mode integration is enabled in Amazon DataZone, the finance team requests a subscription to the sales data asset. The asset shows up as a managed asset, which means Amazon DataZone can manage access to this asset even if the Amazon S3 location of this asset isn’t registered in Lake Formation.
  3. The sales team is notified of a subscription request raised by the finance team. They review and approve the access request. After the request is approved, Amazon DataZone fulfills the subscription request by managing permissions in the Lake Formation. It registers the Amazon S3 location of the subscribed table in Lake Formation hybrid mode.
  4. The finance team gains access to the sales dataset required for their financial reports. They can go to their DataZone environment and start running queries using Athena against their subscribed dataset.

Prerequisites

To follow the steps in this post, you need an AWS account. If you don’t have an account, you can create one. In addition, you must have the following resources configured in your account:

  • An S3 bucket
  • An AWS Glue database and crawler
  • IAM roles for different personas and services
  • An Amazon DataZone domain and project
  • An Amazon DataZone environment profile and environment
  • An Amazon DataZone data source

If you don’t have these resources already configured, you can create them by deploying the following AWS CloudFormation stack:

  1. Choose Launch Stack to deploy a CloudFormation template.
  2. Complete the steps to deploy the template and leave all settings as default.
  3. Select I acknowledge that AWS CloudFormation might create IAM resources, then choose Submit.

After the CloudFormation deployment is complete, you can log in to the Amazon DataZone portal and manually trigger a data source run. This pulls any new or modified metadata from the source and updates the associated assets in the inventory. This data source has been configured to automatically publish the data assets to the catalog.

  1. On the Amazon DataZone console, choose View domains.

You should be logged in using the same role that is used to deploy CloudFormation and verify that you are in the same AWS Region.

  1. Find the domain blog_dz_domain, then choose Open data portal.
  2. Choose Browse all projects and choose Sales producer project.
  3. On the Data tab, choose Data sources in the navigation pane.
  4. Locate and choose the data source that you want to run.

This opens the data source details page.

  1. Choose the options menu (three vertical dots) next to tickit_datasource and choose Run.

The data source status changes to Running as Amazon DataZone updates the asset metadata.

Enable hybrid mode integration in Amazon DataZone

In this step, the Amazon DataZone administrator goes through the process of enabling the Amazon DataZone integration with Lake Formation hybrid access mode. Complete the following steps:

  1. On a separate browser tab, open the Amazon DataZone console.

Verify that you are in the same Region where you deployed the CloudFormation template.

  1. Choose View domains.
  2. Choose the domain created by AWS CloudFormation, blog_dz_domain.
  3. Scroll down on the domain details page and choose the Blueprints tab.

A blueprint defines what AWS tools and services can be used with the data assets published in Amazon DataZone. The DefaultDataLake blueprint is enabled as part of the CloudFormation stack deployment. This blueprint enables you to create and query AWS Glue tables using Athena. For the steps to enable this in your own deployments, refer to Enable built-in blueprints in the AWS account that owns the Amazon DataZone domain.

  1. Choose the DefaultDataLake blueprint.
  2. On the Provisioning tab, choose Edit.
  3. Select Enable Amazon DataZone to register S3 locations using AWS Lake Formation hybrid access mode.

You have the option of excluding specific Amazon S3 locations if you don’t want Amazon DataZone to automatically register them to Lake Formation hybrid access mode.

  1. Choose Save changes.

Request access

In this step, you log in to Amazon DataZone as the finance team, search for the sales data asset, and subscribe to it. Complete the following steps:

  1. Return to your Amazon DataZone data portal browser tab.
  2. Switch to the finance consumer project by choosing the dropdown menu next to the project name and choosing Finance consumer project.

From this step onwards, you take on the persona of a finance user looking to subscribe to a data asset published in the previous step.

  1. In the search bar, search for and choose the sales data asset.
  2. Choose Subscribe.

The asset shows up as managed asset. This means that Amazon DataZone can grant access to this data asset to the finance team’s project by managing the permissions in Lake Formation.

  1. Enter a reason for the access request and choose Subscribe.

Approve access request

The sales team gets a notification that an access request from the finance team is submitted. To approve the request, complete the following steps:

  1. Choose the dropdown menu next to the project name and choose Sales producer project.

You now assume the persona of the sales team, who are the owners and stewards of the sales data assets.

  1. Choose the notification icon at the top-right corner of the DataZone portal.
  2. Choose the Subscription Request Created task.
  3. Grant access to the sales data asset to the finance team and choose Approve.

Analyze the data

The finance team has now been granted access to the sales data, and this dataset has been to their Amazon DataZone environment. They can access the environment and query the sales dataset with Athena, along with any other datasets they currently own. Complete the following steps:

  1. On the dropdown menu, choose Finance consumer project.

On the right pane of the project overview screen, you can find a list of active environments available for use.

  1. Choose the Amazon DataZone environment finance_dz_environment.
  2. In the navigation pane, under Data assets, choose Subscribed.
  3. Verify that your environment now has access to the sales data.

It may take a few minutes for the data asset to be automatically added to your environment.

  1. Choose the new tab icon for Query data.

A new tab opens with the Athena query editor.

  1. For Database, choose finance_consumer_db_tickitdb-<suffix>.

This database will contain your subscribed data assets.

  1. Generate a preview of the sales table by choosing the options menu (three vertical dots) and choosing Preview table.

Clean up

To clean up your resources, complete the following steps:

  1. Switch back to the administrator role you used to deploy the CloudFormation stack.
  2. On the Amazon DataZone console, delete the projects used in this post. This will delete most project-related objects like data assets and environments.
  3. On the AWS CloudFormation console, delete the stack you deployed in the beginning of this post.
  4. On the Amazon S3 console, delete the S3 buckets containing the tickit dataset.
  5. On the Lake Formation console, delete the Lake Formation admins registered by Amazon DataZone.
  6. On the Lake Formation console, delete tables and databases created by Amazon DataZone.

Conclusion

In this post, we discussed how the integration between Amazon DataZone and Lake Formation hybrid access mode simplifies the process to start using Amazon DataZone for end-to-end governance of your data in the AWS Glue Data Catalog. This integration helps you bypass the manual steps of onboarding to Lake Formation before you can start using Amazon DataZone.

For more information on how to get started with Amazon DataZone, refer to the Getting started guide. Check out the YouTube playlist for some of the latest demos of Amazon DataZone and short descriptions of the capabilities available. For more information about Amazon DataZone, see How Amazon DataZone helps customers find value in oceans of data.

About the Authors

Utkarsh Mittal is a Senior Technical Product Manager for Amazon DataZone at AWS. He is passionate about building innovative products that simplify customers’ end-to-end analytics journeys. Outside of the tech world, Utkarsh loves to play music, with drums being his latest endeavor.

Praveen Kumar is a Principal Analytics Solution Architect at AWS with expertise in designing, building, and implementing modern data and analytics platforms using cloud-centered services. His areas of interests are serverless technology, modern cloud data warehouses, streaming, and generative AI applications.

Paul Villena is a Senior Analytics Solutions Architect in AWS with expertise in building modern data and analytics solutions to drive business value. He works with customers to help them harness the power of the cloud. His areas of interests are infrastructure as code, serverless technologies, and coding in Python

Amazon DataZone now integrates with AWS Glue Data Quality and external data quality solutions

Post Syndicated from Andrea Filippo La Scola original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/amazon-datazone-now-integrates-with-aws-glue-data-quality-and-external-data-quality-solutions/

Today, we are pleased to announce that Amazon DataZone is now able to present data quality information for data assets. This information empowers end-users to make informed decisions as to whether or not to use specific assets.

Many organizations already use AWS Glue Data Quality to define and enforce data quality rules on their data, validate data against predefined rules, track data quality metrics, and monitor data quality over time using artificial intelligence (AI). Other organizations monitor the quality of their data through third-party solutions.

Amazon DataZone now integrates directly with AWS Glue to display data quality scores for AWS Glue Data Catalog assets. Additionally, Amazon DataZone now offers APIs for importing data quality scores from external systems.

In this post, we discuss the latest features of Amazon DataZone for data quality, the integration between Amazon DataZone and AWS Glue Data Quality and how you can import data quality scores produced by external systems into Amazon DataZone via API.

Challenges

One of the most common questions we get from customers is related to displaying data quality scores in the Amazon DataZone business data catalog to let business users have visibility into the health and reliability of the datasets.

As data becomes increasingly crucial for driving business decisions, Amazon DataZone users are keenly interested in providing the highest standards of data quality. They recognize the importance of accurate, complete, and timely data in enabling informed decision-making and fostering trust in their analytics and reporting processes.

Amazon DataZone data assets can be updated at varying frequencies. As data is refreshed and updated, changes can happen through upstream processes that put it at risk of not maintaining the intended quality. Data quality scores help you understand if data has maintained the expected level of quality for data consumers to use (through analysis or downstream processes).

From a producer’s perspective, data stewards can now set up Amazon DataZone to automatically import the data quality scores from AWS Glue Data Quality (scheduled or on demand) and include this information in the Amazon DataZone catalog to share with business users. Additionally, you can now use new Amazon DataZone APIs to import data quality scores produced by external systems into the data assets.

With the latest enhancement, Amazon DataZone users can now accomplish the following:

  • Access insights about data quality standards directly from the Amazon DataZone web portal
  • View data quality scores on various KPIs, including data completeness, uniqueness, accuracy
  • Make sure users have a holistic view of the quality and trustworthiness of their data.

In the first part of this post, we walk through the integration between AWS Glue Data Quality and Amazon DataZone. We discuss how to visualize data quality scores in Amazon DataZone, enable AWS Glue Data Quality when creating a new Amazon DataZone data source, and enable data quality for an existing data asset.

In the second part of this post, we discuss how you can import data quality scores produced by external systems into Amazon DataZone via API. In this example, we use Amazon EMR Serverless in combination with the open source library Pydeequ to act as an external system for data quality.

Visualize AWS Glue Data Quality scores in Amazon DataZone

You can now visualize AWS Glue Data Quality scores in data assets that have been published in the Amazon DataZone business catalog and that are searchable through the Amazon DataZone web portal.

If the asset has AWS Glue Data Quality enabled, you can now quickly visualize the data quality score directly in the catalog search pane.

By selecting the corresponding asset, you can understand its content through the readme, glossary terms, and technical and business metadata. Additionally, the overall quality score indicator is displayed in the Asset Details section.

A data quality score serves as an overall indicator of a dataset’s quality, calculated based on the rules you define.

On the Data quality tab, you can access the details of data quality overview indicators and the results of the data quality runs.

The indicators shown on the Overview tab are calculated based on the results of the rulesets from the data quality runs.

Each rule is assigned an attribute that contributes to the calculation of the indicator. For example, rules that have the Completeness attribute will contribute to the calculation of the corresponding indicator on the Overview tab.

To filter data quality results, choose the Applicable column dropdown menu and choose your desired filter parameter.

You can also visualize column-level data quality starting on the Schema tab.

When data quality is enabled for the asset, the data quality results become available, providing insightful quality scores that reflect the integrity and reliability of each column within the dataset.

When you choose one of the data quality result links, you’re redirected to the data quality detail page, filtered by the selected column.

Data quality historical results in Amazon DataZone

Data quality can change over time for many reasons:

  • Data formats may change because of changes in the source systems
  • As data accumulates over time, it may become outdated or inconsistent
  • Data quality can be affected by human errors in data entry, data processing, or data manipulation

In Amazon DataZone, you can now track data quality over time to confirm reliability and accuracy. By analyzing the historical report snapshot, you can identify areas for improvement, implement changes, and measure the effectiveness of those changes.

Enable AWS Glue Data Quality when creating a new Amazon DataZone data source

In this section, we walk through the steps to enable AWS Glue Data Quality when creating a new Amazon DataZone data source.

Prerequisites

To follow along, you should have a domain for Amazon DataZone, an Amazon DataZone project, and a new Amazon DataZone environment (with a DataLakeProfile). For instructions, refer to Amazon DataZone quickstart with AWS Glue data.

You also need to define and run a ruleset against your data, which is a set of data quality rules in AWS Glue Data Quality. To set up the data quality rules and for more information on the topic, refer to the following posts:

After you create the data quality rules, make sure that Amazon DataZone has the permissions to access the AWS Glue database managed through AWS Lake Formation. For instructions, see Configure Lake Formation permissions for Amazon DataZone.

In our example, we have configured a ruleset against a table containing patient data within a healthcare synthetic dataset generated using Synthea. Synthea is a synthetic patient generator that creates realistic patient data and associated medical records that can be used for testing healthcare software applications.

The ruleset contains 27 individual rules (one of them failing), so the overall data quality score is 96%.

If you use Amazon DataZone managed policies, there is no action needed because these will get automatically updated with the needed actions. Otherwise, you need to allow Amazon DataZone to have the required permissions to list and get AWS Glue Data Quality results, as shown in the Amazon DataZone user guide.

Create a data source with data quality enabled

In this section, we create a data source and enable data quality. You can also update an existing data source to enable data quality. We use this data source to import metadata information related to our datasets. Amazon DataZone will also import data quality information related to the (one or more) assets contained in the data source.

  1. On the Amazon DataZone console, choose Data sources in the navigation pane.
  2. Choose Create data source.
  3. For Name, enter a name for your data source.
  4. For Data source type, select AWS Glue.
  5. For Environment, choose your environment.
  6. For Database name, enter a name for the database.
  7. For Table selection criteria, choose your criteria.
  8. Choose Next.
  9. For Data quality, select Enable data quality for this data source.

If data quality is enabled, Amazon DataZone will automatically fetch data quality scores from AWS Glue at each data source run.

  1. Choose Next.

Now you can run the data source.

While running the data source, Amazon DataZone imports the last 100 AWS Glue Data Quality run results. This information is now visible on the asset page and will be visible to all Amazon DataZone users after publishing the asset.

Enable data quality for an existing data asset

In this section, we enable data quality for an existing asset. This might be useful for users that already have data sources in place and want to enable the feature afterwards.

Prerequisites

To follow along, you should have already run the data source and produced an AWS Glue table data asset. Additionally, you should have defined a ruleset in AWS Glue Data Quality over the target table in the Data Catalog.

For this example, we ran the data quality job multiple times against the table, producing the related AWS Glue Data Quality scores, as shown in the following screenshot.

Import data quality scores into the data asset

Complete the following steps to import the existing AWS Glue Data Quality scores into the data asset in Amazon DataZone:

  1. Within the Amazon DataZone project, navigate to the Inventory data pane and choose the data source.

If you choose the Data quality tab, you can see that there’s still no information on data quality because AWS Glue Data Quality integration is not enabled for this data asset yet.

  1. On the Data quality tab, choose Enable data quality.
  2. In the Data quality section, select Enable data quality for this data source.
  3. Choose Save.

Now, back on the Inventory data pane, you can see a new tab: Data quality.

On the Data quality tab, you can see data quality scores imported from AWS Glue Data Quality.

Ingest data quality scores from an external source using Amazon DataZone APIs

Many organizations already use systems that calculate data quality by performing tests and assertions on their datasets. Amazon DataZone now supports importing third-party originated data quality scores via API, allowing users that navigate the web portal to view this information.

In this section, we simulate a third-party system pushing data quality scores into Amazon DataZone via APIs through Boto3 (Python SDK for AWS).

For this example, we use the same synthetic dataset as earlier, generated with Synthea.

The following diagram illustrates the solution architecture.

The workflow consists of the following steps:

  1. Read a dataset of patients in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) directly from Amazon EMR using Spark.

The dataset is created as a generic S3 asset collection in Amazon DataZone.

  1. In Amazon EMR, perform data validation rules against the dataset.
  2. The metrics are saved in Amazon S3 to have a persistent output.
  3. Use Amazon DataZone APIs through Boto3 to push custom data quality metadata.
  4. End-users can see the data quality scores by navigating to the data portal.

Prerequisites

We use Amazon EMR Serverless and Pydeequ to run a fully managed Spark environment. To learn more about Pydeequ as a data testing framework, see Testing Data quality at scale with Pydeequ.

To allow Amazon EMR to send data to the Amazon DataZone domain, make sure that the IAM role used by Amazon EMR has the permissions to do the following:

  • Read from and write to the S3 buckets
  • Call the post_time_series_data_points action for Amazon DataZone: 
    {
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Sid": "Statement1",
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": [
                "datazone:PostTimeSeriesDataPoints"
            ],
            "Resource": [
                "<datazone_domain_arn>"
            ]
        }
    ]
}

Make sure that you added the EMR role as a project member in the Amazon DataZone project. On the Amazon DataZone console, navigate to the Project members page and choose Add members.

Add the EMR role as a contributor.

Ingest and analyze PySpark code

In this section, we analyze the PySpark code that we use to perform data quality checks and send the results to Amazon DataZone. You can download the complete PySpark script.

To run the script entirely, you can submit a job to EMR Serverless. The service will take care of scheduling the job and automatically allocating the resources needed, enabling you to track the job run statuses throughout the process.

You can submit a job to EMR within the Amazon EMR console using EMR Studio or programmatically, using the AWS CLI or using one of the AWS SDKs.

In Apache Spark, a SparkSession is the entry point for interacting with DataFrames and Spark’s built-in functions. The script will start initializing a SparkSession:

with SparkSession.builder.appName("PatientsDataValidation") \
        .config("spark.jars.packages", pydeequ.deequ_maven_coord) \
        .config("spark.jars.excludes", pydeequ.f2j_maven_coord) \
        .getOrCreate() as spark:

We read a dataset from Amazon S3. For increased modularity, you can use the script input to refer to the S3 path:

s3inputFilepath = sys.argv[1]
s3outputLocation = sys.argv[2]

df = spark.read.format("csv") \
            .option("header", "true") \
            .option("inferSchema", "true") \
            .load(s3inputFilepath) #s3://<bucket_name>/patients/patients.csv

Next, we set up a metrics repository. This can be helpful to persist the run results in Amazon S3.

metricsRepository = FileSystemMetricsRepository(spark, s3_write_path)

Pydeequ allows you to create data quality rules using the builder pattern, which is a well-known software engineering design pattern, concatenating instruction to instantiate a VerificationSuite object:

key_tags = {'tag': 'patient_df'}
resultKey = ResultKey(spark, ResultKey.current_milli_time(), key_tags)

check = Check(spark, CheckLevel.Error, "Integrity checks")

checkResult = VerificationSuite(spark) \
    .onData(df) \
    .useRepository(metricsRepository) \
    .addCheck(
        check.hasSize(lambda x: x >= 1000) \
        .isComplete("birthdate")  \
        .isUnique("id")  \
        .isComplete("ssn") \
        .isComplete("first") \
        .isComplete("last") \
        .hasMin("healthcare_coverage", lambda x: x == 1000.0)) \
    .saveOrAppendResult(resultKey) \
    .run()

checkResult_df = VerificationResult.checkResultsAsDataFrame(spark, checkResult)
checkResult_df.show()

The following is the output for the data validation rules:

+----------------+-----------+------------+----------------------------------------------------+-----------------+----------------------------------------------------+
|check           |check_level|check_status|constraint                                          |constraint_status|constraint_message                                  |
+----------------+-----------+------------+----------------------------------------------------+-----------------+----------------------------------------------------+
|Integrity checks|Error      |Error       |SizeConstraint(Size(None))                          |Success          |                                                    |
|Integrity checks|Error      |Error       |CompletenessConstraint(Completeness(birthdate,None))|Success          |                                                    |
|Integrity checks|Error      |Error       |UniquenessConstraint(Uniqueness(List(id),None))     |Success          |                                                    |
|Integrity checks|Error      |Error       |CompletenessConstraint(Completeness(ssn,None))      |Success          |                                                    |
|Integrity checks|Error      |Error       |CompletenessConstraint(Completeness(first,None))    |Success          |                                                    |
|Integrity checks|Error      |Error       |CompletenessConstraint(Completeness(last,None))     |Success          |                                                    |
|Integrity checks|Error      |Error       |MinimumConstraint(Minimum(healthcare_coverage,None))|Failure          |Value: 0.0 does not meet the constraint requirement!|
+----------------+-----------+------------+----------------------------------------------------+-----------------+----------------------------------------------------+

At this point, we want to insert these data quality values in Amazon DataZone. To do so, we use the post_time_series_data_points function in the Boto3 Amazon DataZone client.

The PostTimeSeriesDataPoints DataZone API allows you to insert new time series data points for a given asset or listing, without creating a new revision.

At this point, you might also want to have more information on which fields are sent as input for the API. You can use the APIs to obtain the specification for Amazon DataZone form types; in our case, it’s amazon.datazone.DataQualityResultFormType.

You can also use the AWS CLI to invoke the API and display the form structure:

aws datazone get-form-type --domain-identifier <your_domain_id> --form-type-identifier amazon.datazone.DataQualityResultFormType --region <domain_region> --output text --query 'model.smithy'

This output helps identify the required API parameters, including fields and value limits:

$version: "2.0"
namespace amazon.datazone
structure DataQualityResultFormType {
    @amazon.datazone#timeSeriesSummary
    @range(min: 0, max: 100)
    passingPercentage: Double
    @amazon.datazone#timeSeriesSummary
    evaluationsCount: Integer
    evaluations: EvaluationResults
}
@length(min: 0, max: 2000)
list EvaluationResults {
    member: EvaluationResult
}

@length(min: 0, max: 20)
list ApplicableFields {
    member: String
}

@length(min: 0, max: 20)
list EvaluationTypes {
    member: String
}

enum EvaluationStatus {
    PASS,
    FAIL
}

string EvaluationDetailType

map EvaluationDetails {
    key: EvaluationDetailType
    value: String
}

structure EvaluationResult {
    description: String
    types: EvaluationTypes
    applicableFields: ApplicableFields
    status: EvaluationStatus
    details: EvaluationDetails
}

To send the appropriate form data, we need to convert the Pydeequ output to match the DataQualityResultsFormType contract. This can be achieved with a Python function that processes the results.

For each DataFrame row, we extract information from the constraint column. For example, take the following code:

CompletenessConstraint(Completeness(birthdate,None))

We convert it to the following:

{
  "constraint": "CompletenessConstraint",
  "statisticName": "Completeness_custom",
  "column": "birthdate"
}

Make sure to send an output that matches the KPIs that you want to track. In our case, we are appending _custom to the statistic name, resulting in the following format for KPIs:

  • Completeness_custom
  • Uniqueness_custom

In a real-world scenario, you might want to set a value that matches with your data quality framework in relation to the KPIs that you want to track in Amazon DataZone.

After applying a transformation function, we have a Python object for each rule evaluation:

..., {
   'applicableFields': ["healthcare_coverage"],
   'types': ["Minimum_custom"],
   'status': 'FAIL',
   'description': 'MinimumConstraint - Minimum - Value: 0.0 does not meet the constraint requirement!'
 },...

We also use the constraint_status column to compute the overall score:

(number of success / total number of evaluation) * 100

In our example, this results in a passing percentage of 85.71%.

We set this value in the passingPercentage input field along with the other information related to the evaluations in the input of the Boto3 method post_time_series_data_points:

import boto3

# Instantiate the client library to communicate with Amazon DataZone Service
#
datazone = boto3.client(
    service_name='datazone', 
    region_name=<Region(String) example: us-east-1>
)

# Perform the API operation to push the Data Quality information to Amazon DataZone
#
datazone.post_time_series_data_points(
    domainIdentifier=<DataZone domain ID>,
    entityIdentifier=<DataZone asset ID>,
    entityType='ASSET',
    forms=[
        {
            "content": json.dumps({
                    "evaluationsCount":<Number of evaluations (number)>,
                    "evaluations": [<List of objects {
                        'description': <Description (String)>,
                        'applicableFields': [<List of columns involved (String)>],
                        'types': [<List of KPIs (String)>],
                        'status': <FAIL/PASS (string)>
                        }>
                     ],
                    "passingPercentage":<Score (number)>
                }),
            "formName": <Form name(String) example: PydeequRuleSet1>,
            "typeIdentifier": "amazon.datazone.DataQualityResultFormType",
            "timestamp": <Date (timestamp)>
        }
    ]
)

Boto3 invokes the Amazon DataZone APIs. In these examples, we used Boto3 and Python, but you can choose one of the AWS SDKs developed in the language you prefer.

After setting the appropriate domain and asset ID and running the method, we can check on the Amazon DataZone console that the asset data quality is now visible on the asset page.

We can observe that the overall score matches with the API input value. We can also see that we were able to add customized KPIs on the overview tab through custom types parameter values.

With the new Amazon DataZone APIs, you can load data quality rules from third-party systems into a specific data asset. With this capability, Amazon DataZone allows you to extend the types of indicators present in AWS Glue Data Quality (such as completeness, minimum, and uniqueness) with custom indicators.

Clean up

We recommend deleting any potentially unused resources to avoid incurring unexpected costs. For example, you can delete the Amazon DataZone domain and the EMR application you created during this process.

Conclusion

In this post, we highlighted the latest features of Amazon DataZone for data quality, empowering end-users with enhanced context and visibility into their data assets. Furthermore, we delved into the seamless integration between Amazon DataZone and AWS Glue Data Quality. You can also use the Amazon DataZone APIs to integrate with external data quality providers, enabling you to maintain a comprehensive and robust data strategy within your AWS environment.

To learn more about Amazon DataZone, refer to the Amazon DataZone User Guide.

About the Authors


Andrea Filippo is a Partner Solutions Architect at AWS supporting Public Sector partners and customers in Italy. He focuses on modern data architectures and helping customers accelerate their cloud journey with serverless technologies.

Emanuele is a Solutions Architect at AWS, based in Italy, after living and working for more than 5 years in Spain. He enjoys helping large companies with the adoption of cloud technologies, and his area of expertise is mainly focused on Data Analytics and Data Management. Outside of work, he enjoys traveling and collecting action figures.

Varsha Velagapudi is a Senior Technical Product Manager with Amazon DataZone at AWS. She focuses on improving data discovery and curation required for data analytics. She is passionate about simplifying customers’ AI/ML and analytics journey to help them succeed in their day-to-day tasks. Outside of work, she enjoys nature and outdoor activities, reading, and traveling.

AI recommendations for descriptions in Amazon DataZone for enhanced business data cataloging and discovery is now generally available

Post Syndicated from Varsha Velagapudi original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/ai-recommendations-for-descriptions-in-amazon-datazone-for-enhanced-business-data-cataloging-and-discovery-is-now-generally-available/

In March 2024, we announced the general availability of the generative artificial intelligence (AI) generated data descriptions in Amazon DataZone. In this post, we share what we heard from our customers that led us to add the AI-generated data descriptions and discuss specific customer use cases addressed by this capability. We also detail how the feature works and what criteria was applied for the model and prompt selection while building on Amazon Bedrock.

Amazon DataZone enables you to discover, access, share, and govern data at scale across organizational boundaries, reducing the undifferentiated heavy lifting of making data and analytics tools accessible to everyone in the organization. With Amazon DataZone, data users like data engineers, data scientists, and data analysts can share and access data across AWS accounts using a unified data portal, allowing them to discover, use, and collaborate on this data across their teams and organizations. Additionally, data owners and data stewards can make data discovery simpler by adding business context to data while balancing access governance to the data in the user interface.

What we hear from customers

Organizations are adopting enterprise-wide data discovery and governance solutions like Amazon DataZone to unlock the value from petabytes, and even exabytes, of data spread across multiple departments, services, on-premises databases, and third-party sources (such as partner solutions and public datasets). Data consumers need detailed descriptions of the business context of a data asset and documentation about its recommended use cases to quickly identify the relevant data for their intended use case. Without the right metadata and documentation, data consumers overlook valuable datasets relevant to their use case or spend more time going back and forth with data producers to understand the data and its relevance for their use case—or worse, misuse the data for a purpose it was not intended for. For instance, a dataset designated for testing might mistakenly be used for financial forecasting, resulting in poor predictions. Data producers find it tedious and time consuming to maintain extensive and up-to-date documentation on their data and respond to continued questions from data consumers. As data proliferates across the data mesh, these challenges only intensify, often resulting in under-utilization of their data.

Introducing generative AI-powered data descriptions

With AI-generated descriptions in Amazon DataZone, data consumers have these recommended descriptions to identify data tables and columns for analysis, which enhances data discoverability and cuts down on back-and-forth communications with data producers. Data consumers have more contextualized data at their fingertips to inform their analysis. The automatically generated descriptions enable a richer search experience for data consumers because search results are now also based on detailed descriptions, possible use cases, and key columns. This feature also elevates data discovery and interpretation by providing recommendations on analytical applications for a dataset giving customers additional confidence in their analysis. Because data producers can generate contextual descriptions of data, its schema, and data insights with a single click, they are incentivized to make more data available to data consumers. With the addition of automatically generated descriptions, Amazon DataZone helps organizations interpret their extensive and distributed data repositories.

The following is an example of the asset summary and use cases detailed description.

Use cases served by generative AI-powered data descriptions

The automatically generated descriptions capability in Amazon DataZone streamlines relevant descriptions, provides usage recommendations and ultimately enhances the overall efficiency of data-driven decision-making. It saves organizations time for catalog curation and speeds discovery for relevant use cases of the data. It offers the following benefits:

  • Aid search and discovery of valuable datasets – With the clarity provided by automatically generated descriptions, data consumers are less likely to overlook critical datasets through enhanced search and faster understanding, so every valuable insight from the data is recognized and utilized.
  • Guide data application – Misapplying data can lead to incorrect analyses, missed opportunities, or skewed results. Automatically generated descriptions offer AI-driven recommendations on how best to use datasets, helping customers apply them in contexts where they are appropriate and effective.
  • Increase efficiency in data documentation and discovery – Automatically generated descriptions streamline the traditionally tedious and manual process of data cataloging. This reduces the need for time-consuming manual documentation, making data more easily discoverable and comprehensible.

Solution overview

The AI recommendations feature in Amazon DataZone was built on Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service that offers a choice of high-performing foundation models. To generate high-quality descriptions and impactful use cases, we use the available metadata on the asset such as the table name, column names, and optional metadata provided by the data producers. The recommendations don’t use any data that resides in the tables unless explicitly provided by the user as content in the metadata.

To get the customized generations, we first infer the domain corresponding to the table (such as automotive industry, finance, or healthcare), which then guides the rest of the workflow towards generating customized descriptions and use cases. The generated table description contains information about how the columns are related to each other, as well as the overall meaning of the table, in the context of the identified industry segment. The table description also contains a narrative style description of the most important constituent columns. The use cases provided are also tailored to the domain identified, which are suitable not just for expert practitioners from the specific domain, but also for generalists.

The generated descriptions are composed from LLM-produced outputs for table description, column description, and use cases, generated in a sequential order. For instance, the column descriptions are generated first by jointly passing the table name, schema (list of column names and their data types), and other available optional metadata. The obtained column descriptions are then used in conjunction with the table schema and metadata to obtain table descriptions and so on. This follows a consistent order like what a human would follow when trying to understand a table.

The following diagram illustrates this workflow.

Evaluating and selecting the foundation model and prompts

Amazon DataZone manages the model(s) selection for the recommendation generation. The model(s) used can be updated or changed from time-to-time. Selecting the appropriate models and prompting strategies is a critical step in confirming the quality of the generated content, while also achieving low costs and low latencies. To realize this, we evaluated our workflow using multiple criteria on datasets that spanned more than 20 different industry domains before finalizing a model. Our evaluation mechanisms can be summarized as follows:

  • Tracking automated metrics for quality assessment – We tracked a combination of more than 10 supervised and unsupervised metrics to evaluate essential quality factors such as informativeness, conciseness, reliability, semantic coverage, coherence, and cohesiveness. This allowed us to capture and quantify the nuanced attributes of generated content, confirming that it meets our high standards for clarity and relevance.
  • Detecting inconsistencies and hallucinations – Next, we addressed the challenge of content reliability generated by LLMs through our self-consistency-based hallucination detection. This identifies any potential non-factuality in the generated content, and also serves as a proxy for confidence scores, as an additional layer of quality assurance.
  • Using large language models as judges – Lastly, our evaluation process incorporates a method of judgment: using multiple state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) as evaluators. By using bias-mitigation techniques and aggregating the scores from these advanced models, we can obtain a well-rounded assessment of the content’s quality.

The approach of using LLMs as a judge, hallucination detection, and automated metrics brings diverse perspectives into our evaluation, as a proxy for expert human evaluations.

Getting started with generative AI-powered data descriptions

To get started, log in to the Amazon DataZone data portal. Go to your asset in your data project and choose Generate summary to obtain the detailed description of the asset and its columns. Amazon DataZone uses the available metadata on the asset to generate the descriptions. You can optionally provide additional context as metadata in the readme section or metadata form content on the asset for more customized descriptions. For detailed instructions, refer to New generative AI capabilities for Amazon DataZone further simplify data cataloging and discovery (preview). For API instructions, see Using machine learning and generative AI.

Amazon DataZone AI recommendations for descriptions is generally available in Amazon DataZone domains provisioned in the following AWS Regions: US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and Europe (Frankfurt).

For pricing, you will be charged for input and output tokens for generating column descriptions, asset descriptions, and analytical use cases in AI recommendations for descriptions. For more details, see Amazon DataZone Pricing.

Conclusion

In this post, we discussed the challenges and key use cases for the new AI recommendations for descriptions feature in Amazon DataZone. We detailed how the feature works and how the model and prompt selection were done to provide the most useful recommendations.

If you have any feedback or questions, leave them in the comments section.

About the Authors

Varsha Velagapudi is a Senior Technical Product Manager with Amazon DataZone at AWS. She focuses on improving data discovery and curation required for data analytics. She is passionate about simplifying customers’ AI/ML and analytics journey to help them succeed in their day-to-day tasks. Outside of work, she enjoys playing with her 3-year old, reading, and traveling.

Zhengyuan Shen is an Applied Scientist at Amazon AWS, specializing in advancements in AI, particularly in large language models and their application in data comprehension. He is passionate about leveraging innovative ML scientific solutions to enhance products or services, thereby simplifying the lives of customers through a seamless blend of science and engineering. Outside of work, he enjoys cooking, weightlifting, and playing poker.

Balasubramaniam Srinivasan is an Applied Scientist at Amazon AWS, working on foundational models for structured data and natural sciences. He enjoys enriching ML models with domain-specific knowledge and inductive biases to delight customers. Outside of work, he enjoys playing and watching tennis and soccer.

AWS Weekly Roundup — AWS Chips Taste Test, generative AI updates, Community Days, and more — April 1, 2024

Post Syndicated from Channy Yun original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-weekly-roundup-aws-chips-taste-test-generative-ai-updates-community-days-and-more-april-1-2024/

Today is April Fool’s Day. About 10 years ago, some tech companies would joke about an idea that was thought to be fun and unfeasible on April 1st, to the delight of readers. Jeff Barr has also posted seemingly far-fetched ideas on this blog in the past, and some of these have surprisingly come true! Here are examples:

Year Joke Reality
2010 Introducing QC2 – the Quantum Compute Cloud, a production-ready quantum computer to solve certain types of math and logic problems with breathtaking speed. In 2019, we launched Amazon Braket, a fully managed service that allows scientists, researchers, and developers to begin experimenting with computers from multiple quantum hardware providers in a single place.
2011 Announcing AWS $NAME, a scalable event service to find and automatically integrate with your systems on the cloud, on premises, and even your house and room. In 2019, we introduced Amazon EventBridge to make it easy for you to integrate your own AWS applications with third-party applications. If you use AWS IoT Events, you can monitor and respond to events at scale from your IoT devices at home.
2012 New Amazon EC2 Fresh Servers to deliver a fresh (physical) EC2 server in 15 minutes using atmospheric delivery and communucation from a fleet of satellites. In 2021, we launched AWS Outposts Server, 1U/2U physical servers with built-in AWS services. In 2023, Project Kuiper completed successful tests of an optical mesh network in low Earth orbit. Now, we only need to develop satellite warehouse and atmospheric re-entry technology to follow Amazon PrimeAir’s drone delivery.
2013 PC2 – The New Punched Card Cloud, a new mf (mainframe) instance family, Mainframe Machine Images (MMI), tape storage, and punched card interfaces for mainframe computers used from the 1970s to ’80s. In 2022, we launched AWS Mainframe Modernization to help you modernize your mainframe applications and deploy them to AWS fully managed runtime environments.

Jeff returns! This year, we have AWS “Chips” Taste Test for him to indulge in, drawing unique parallels between chip flavors and silicon innovations. He compared the taste of “Golden Nacho Cheese,” “Al Chili Lime,” and “BBQ Training Wheels” with AWS Graviton, AWS Inferentia, and AWS Trainium chips.

What’s your favorite? Watch a fun video in the LinkedIn and X post of AWS social media channels.

Last week’s launches
If we stay curious, keep learning, and insist on high standards, we will continue to see more ideas turn into reality. The same goes for the generative artificial intelligence (generative AI) world. Here are some launches that utilize generative AI technology this week.

Knowledge Bases for Amazon Bedrock – Anthropic’s Claude 3 Sonnet foundation model (FM) is now generally available on Knowledge Bases for Amazon Bedrock to connect internal data sources for Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG).

Knowledge Bases for Amazon Bedrock support metadata filtering, which improves retrieval accuracy by ensuring the documents are relevant to the query. You can narrow search results by specifying which documents to include or exclude from a query, resulting in more relevant responses generated by FMs such as Claude 3 Sonnet.

Finally, you can customize prompts and number of retrieval results in Knowledge Bases for Amazon Bedrock. With custom prompts, you can tailor the prompt instructions by adding context, user input, or output indicator(s), for the model to generate responses that more closely match your use case needs. You can now control the amount of information needed to generate a final response by adjusting the number of retrieved passages. To learn more these new features, visit Knowledge bases for Amazon Bedrock in the AWS documentation.

Amazon Connect Contact Lens – At AWS re:Invent 2023, we previewed a generative AI capability to summarize long customer conversations into succinct, coherent, and context-rich contact summaries to help improve contact quality and agent performance. These generative AI–powered post-contact summaries are now available in Amazon Connect Contact Lens.

Amazon DataZone – At AWS re:Invent 2023, we also previewed a generative AI–based capability to generate comprehensive business data descriptions and context and include recommendations on analytical use cases. These generative AI–powered recommendations for descriptions are now available in Amazon DataZone.

There are also other important launches you shouldn’t miss:

A new Local Zone in Miami, Florida – AWS Local Zones are an AWS infrastructure deployment that places compute, storage, database, and other select services closer to large populations, industry, and IT centers where no AWS Region exists. You can now use a new Local Zone in Miami, Florida, to run applications that require single-digit millisecond latency, such as real-time gaming, hybrid migrations, and live video streaming. Enable the new Local Zone in Miami (use1-mia2-az1) from the Zones tab in the Amazon EC2 console settings to get started.

New Amazon EC2 C7gn metal instance – You can use AWS Graviton based new C7gn bare metal instances to run applications that benefit from deep performance analysis tools, specialized workloads that require direct access to bare metal infrastructure, legacy workloads not supported in virtual environments, and licensing-restricted business-critical applications. The EC2 C7gn metal size comes with 64 vCPUs and 128 GiB of memory.

AWS Batch multi-container jobs – You can use multi-container jobs in AWS Batch, making it easier and faster to run large-scale simulations in areas like autonomous vehicles and robotics. With the ability to run multiple containers per job, you get the advanced scaling, scheduling, and cost optimization offered by AWS Batch, and you can use modular containers representing different components like 3D environments, robot sensors, or monitoring sidecars.

Amazon Guardduty EC2 Runtime Monitoring – We are announcing the general availability of Amazon GuardDuty EC2 Runtime Monitoring to expand threat detection coverage for EC2 instances at runtime and complement the anomaly detection that GuardDuty already provides by continuously monitoring VPC Flow Logs, DNS query logs, and AWS CloudTrail management events. You now have visibility into on-host, OS-level activities and container-level context into detected threats.

GitLab support for AWS CodeBuild – You can now use GitLab and GitLab self-managed as the source provider for your CodeBuild projects. You can initiate builds from changes in source code hosted in your GitLab repositories. To get started with CodeBuild’s new source providers, visit the AWS CodeBuild User Guide.

Retroactive support for AWS cost allocation tags – You can enable AWS cost allocation tags retroactively for up to 12 months. Previously, when you activated resource tags for cost allocation purposes, the tags only took effect prospectively. Submit a backfill request, specifying the duration of time you want the cost allocation tags to be backfilled. Once the backfill is complete, the cost and usage data from prior months will be tagged with the current cost allocation tags.

For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New at AWS page.

Other AWS News
Some other updates and news about generative AI that you might have missed:

Amazon and Anthropic’s AI investiment – Read the latest milestone in our strategic collaboration and investment with Anthropic. Now, Anthropic is using AWS as its primary cloud provider and will use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips for mission-critical workloads, including safety research and future FM development. Earlier this month, we announced access to Anthropic’s most powerful FM, Claude 3, on Amazon Bedrock. We announced availability of Sonnet on March 4 and Haiku on March 13. To learn more, watch the video introducing Claude on Amazon Bedrock.

Virtual building assistant built on Amazon Bedrock – BrainBox AI announced the launch of ARIA (Artificial Responsive Intelligent Assistant) powered by Amazon Bedrock. ARIA is designed to enhance building efficiency by assimilating seamlessly into the day-to-day processes related to building management. To learn more, read the full customer story and watch the video on how to reduce a building’s CO2 footprint with ARIA.

Solar models available on Amazon SageMaker JumpStart – Upstage Solar is a large language model (LLM) 100 percent pre-trained with Amazon SageMaker that outperforms and uses its compact size and powerful track record to specialize in purpose training, making it versatile across languages, domains, and tasks. Now, Solar Mini is available on Amazon SageMaker JumpStart. To learn more, watch how to deploy Solar models in SageMaker JumpStart.

AWS open source news and updates – My colleague Ricardo writes this weekly open source newsletter in which he highlights new open source projects, tools, and demos from the AWS Community. Last week’s highlight was news that Linux Foundation launched Valkey community, an open source alternative to the Redis in-memory, NoSQL data store.

Upcoming AWS Events
Check your calendars and sign up for upcoming AWS events:

AWS SummitAWS Summits – Join free online and in-person events that bring the cloud computing community together to connect, collaborate, and learn about AWS. Register in your nearest city: Paris (April 3), Amsterdam (April 9), Sydney (April 10–11), London (April 24), Berlin (May 15–16), and Seoul (May 16–17), Hong Kong (May 22), Milan (May 23), Dubai (May 29), Stockholm (June 4), and Madrid (June 5).

AWS re:Inforce – Explore cloud security in the age of generative AI at AWS re:Inforce, June 10–12 in Pennsylvania for two-and-a-half days of immersive cloud security learning designed to help drive your business initiatives. Read the story from AWS Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) Chris Betz about a bit of what you can expect at re:Inforce.

AWS Community Days – Join community-led conferences that feature technical discussions, workshops, and hands-on labs led by expert AWS users and industry leaders from around the world: Mumbai (April 6), Poland (April 11), Bay Area (April 12), Kenya (April 20), and Turkey (May 18).

You can browse all upcoming AWS led in-person and virtual events and developer-focused events such as AWS DevDay.

That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Week in Review!

— Channy

This post is part of our Week in Review series. Check back each week for a quick roundup of interesting news and announcements from AWS.

New generative AI capabilities for Amazon DataZone to further simplify data cataloging and discovery (preview)

Post Syndicated from Channy Yun original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-generative-ai-capabilities-for-amazon-datazone-to-further-simplify-data-cataloging-and-discovery-preview/

Today, we are announcing a preview of an automation feature backed by generative artificial intelligence (AI) for Amazon DataZone that will dramatically decrease the amount of time needed to provide context for organizational data. The new feature can automate the traditionally labor-intensive process of data cataloging. Powered by the large language models (LLMs) of Amazon Bedrock, it generates detailed descriptions of data assets and their schemas, and suggests analytical use cases. You can generate a comprehensive business context with a single click.

We heard from customers that data consumers such as data analysts, scientists, and engineers in organizations struggle to understand the data’s relevance with little metadata. As a result, they either spend more time interpreting the data, or they return to data producers with continued questions. So, data producers such as data owners, engineers, and analysts who own the data and make it available for consumers need to manually enter detailed context for higher-priority data to make data shareable and discoverable. This is time-consuming and the number one problem customers have when trying to collate their data in a system for self-service by consumers.

When we launched the general availability of Amazon DataZone in October 2023, we introduced the first feature that brings generative AI capabilities to automate the generation of the table name and column names of a business catalog asset. In the data portal of Amazon DataZone, the green brain icon indicates automatically generated metadata suggestions. You could accept, edit, or reject each suggestion recommended by Amazon DataZone.

What’s new with today’s preview announcement?
Now, in addition to column and table names, you can automatically generate more detailed descriptions of the table and schema, as well as suggested uses.

In the Business Metadata tab in the data portal, when you choose Generate summary, new content will be generated to explain the table and its metadata.

You can also accept, edit, and reject this recommendation.

When you choose the Schema tab, you can also see new Description recommendations as well as the Name. You can review generated metadata and choose to accept, edit, or reject the recommendation.

This new feature will enhance data discoverability and reduce on back-and-forth communications between data consumers and producers. You will have a richer search experience based on extensive data insights in the future.

Join the preview
The new metadata generation ability is now previewed in the AWS US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon) Regions. With this new generative AI capability, you can reduce time-to-insight by accelerating data cataloging and boosting data discovery. To learn more, visit the Amazon DataZone: Automate Data Discovery.

Give it a try and send feedback to AWS re:Post for Amazon DataZone or through your usual AWS Support contacts.

— Channy

Unstructured data management and governance using AWS AI/ML and analytics services

Post Syndicated from Sakti Mishra original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/unstructured-data-management-and-governance-using-aws-ai-ml-and-analytics-services/

Unstructured data is information that doesn’t conform to a predefined schema or isn’t organized according to a preset data model. Unstructured information may have a little or a lot of structure but in ways that are unexpected or inconsistent. Text, images, audio, and videos are common examples of unstructured data. Most companies produce and consume unstructured data such as documents, emails, web pages, engagement center phone calls, and social media. By some estimates, unstructured data can make up to 80–90% of all new enterprise data and is growing many times faster than structured data. After decades of digitizing everything in your enterprise, you may have an enormous amount of data, but with dormant value. However, with the help of AI and machine learning (ML), new software tools are now available to unearth the value of unstructured data.

In this post, we discuss how AWS can help you successfully address the challenges of extracting insights from unstructured data. We discuss various design patterns and architectures for extracting and cataloging valuable insights from unstructured data using AWS. Additionally, we show how to use AWS AI/ML services for analyzing unstructured data.

Why it’s challenging to process and manage unstructured data

Unstructured data makes up a large proportion of the data in the enterprise that can’t be stored in a traditional relational database management systems (RDBMS). Understanding the data, categorizing it, storing it, and extracting insights from it can be challenging. In addition, identifying incremental changes requires specialized patterns and detecting sensitive data and meeting compliance requirements calls for sophisticated functions. It can be difficult to integrate unstructured data with structured data from existing information systems. Some view structured and unstructured data as apples and oranges, instead of being complementary. But most important of all, the assumed dormant value in the unstructured data is a question mark, which can only be answered after these sophisticated techniques have been applied. Therefore, there is a need to being able to analyze and extract value from the data economically and flexibly.

Solution overview

Data and metadata discovery is one of the primary requirements in data analytics, where data consumers explore what data is available and in what format, and then consume or query it for analysis. If you can apply a schema on top of the dataset, then it’s straightforward to query because you can load the data into a database or impose a virtual table schema for querying. But in the case of unstructured data, metadata discovery is challenging because the raw data isn’t easily readable.

You can integrate different technologies or tools to build a solution. In this post, we explain how to integrate different AWS services to provide an end-to-end solution that includes data extraction, management, and governance.

The solution integrates data in three tiers. The first is the raw input data that gets ingested by source systems, the second is the output data that gets extracted from input data using AI, and the third is the metadata layer that maintains a relationship between them for data discovery.

The following is a high-level architecture of the solution we can build to process the unstructured data, assuming the input data is being ingested to the raw input object store.

Unstructured Data Management - Block Level Architecture Diagram

The steps of the workflow are as follows:

  1. Integrated AI services extract data from the unstructured data.
  2. These services write the output to a data lake.
  3. A metadata layer helps build the relationship between the raw data and AI extracted output. When the data and metadata are available for end-users, we can break the user access pattern into additional steps.
  4. In the metadata catalog discovery step, we can use query engines to access the metadata for discovery and apply filters as per our analytics needs. Then we move to the next stage of accessing the actual data extracted from the raw unstructured data.
  5. The end-user accesses the output of the AI services and uses the query engines to query the structured data available in the data lake. We can optionally integrate additional tools that help control access and provide governance.
  6. There might be scenarios where, after accessing the AI extracted output, the end-user wants to access the original raw object (such as media files) for further analysis. Additionally, we need to make sure we have access control policies so the end-user has access only to the respective raw data they want to access.

Now that we understand the high-level architecture, let’s discuss what AWS services we can integrate in each step of the architecture to provide an end-to-end solution.

The following diagram is the enhanced version of our solution architecture, where we have integrated AWS services.

Unstructured Data Management - AWS Native Architecture

Let’s understand how these AWS services are integrated in detail. We have divided the steps into two broad user flows: data processing and metadata enrichment (Steps 1–3) and end-users accessing the data and metadata with fine-grained access control (Steps 4–6).

  1. Various AI services (which we discuss in the next section) extract data from the unstructured datasets.
  2. The output is written to an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket (labeled Extracted JSON in the preceding diagram). Optionally, we can restructure the input raw objects for better partitioning, which can help while implementing fine-grained access control on the raw input data (labeled as the Partitioned bucket in the diagram).
  3. After the initial data extraction phase, we can apply additional transformations to enrich the datasets using AWS Glue. We also build an additional metadata layer, which maintains a relationship between the raw S3 object path, the AI extracted output path, the optional enriched version S3 path, and any other metadata that will help the end-user discover the data.
  4. In the metadata catalog discovery step, we use the AWS Glue Data Catalog as the technical catalog, Amazon Athena and Amazon Redshift Spectrum as query engines, AWS Lake Formation for fine-grained access control, and Amazon DataZone for additional governance.
  5. The AI extracted output is expected to be available as a delimited file or in JSON format. We can create an AWS Glue Data Catalog table for querying using Athena or Redshift Spectrum. Like the previous step, we can use Lake Formation policies for fine-grained access control.
  6. Lastly, the end-user accesses the raw unstructured data available in Amazon S3 for further analysis. We have proposed integrating Amazon S3 Access Points for access control at this layer. We explain this in detail later in this post.

Now let’s expand the following parts of the architecture to understand the implementation better:

  • Using AWS AI services to process unstructured data
  • Using S3 Access Points to integrate access control on raw S3 unstructured data

Process unstructured data with AWS AI services

As we discussed earlier, unstructured data can come in a variety of formats, such as text, audio, video, and images, and each type of data requires a different approach for extracting metadata. AWS AI services are designed to extract metadata from different types of unstructured data. The following are the most commonly used services for unstructured data processing:

  • Amazon Comprehend – This natural language processing (NLP) service uses ML to extract metadata from text data. It can analyze text in multiple languages, detect entities, extract key phrases, determine sentiment, and more. With Amazon Comprehend, you can easily gain insights from large volumes of text data such as extracting product entity, customer name, and sentiment from social media posts.
  • Amazon Transcribe – This speech-to-text service uses ML to convert speech to text and extract metadata from audio data. It can recognize multiple speakers, transcribe conversations, identify keywords, and more. With Amazon Transcribe, you can convert unstructured data such as customer support recordings into text and further derive insights from it.
  • Amazon Rekognition – This image and video analysis service uses ML to extract metadata from visual data. It can recognize objects, people, faces, and text, detect inappropriate content, and more. With Amazon Rekognition, you can easily analyze images and videos to gain insights such as identifying entity type (human or other) and identifying if the person is a known celebrity in an image.
  • Amazon Textract – You can use this ML service to extract metadata from scanned documents and images. It can extract text, tables, and forms from images, PDFs, and scanned documents. With Amazon Textract, you can digitize documents and extract data such as customer name, product name, product price, and date from an invoice.
  • Amazon SageMaker – This service enables you to build and deploy custom ML models for a wide range of use cases, including extracting metadata from unstructured data. With SageMaker, you can build custom models that are tailored to your specific needs, which can be particularly useful for extracting metadata from unstructured data that requires a high degree of accuracy or domain-specific knowledge.
  • Amazon Bedrock – This fully managed service offers a choice of high-performing foundation models (FMs) from leading AI companies like AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Cohere, Meta, Stability AI, and Amazon with a single API. It also offers a broad set of capabilities to build generative AI applications, simplifying development while maintaining privacy and security.

With these specialized AI services, you can efficiently extract metadata from unstructured data and use it for further analysis and insights. It’s important to note that each service has its own strengths and limitations, and choosing the right service for your specific use case is critical for achieving accurate and reliable results.

AWS AI services are available via various APIs, which enables you to integrate AI capabilities into your applications and workflows. AWS Step Functions is a serverless workflow service that allows you to coordinate and orchestrate multiple AWS services, including AI services, into a single workflow. This can be particularly useful when you need to process large amounts of unstructured data and perform multiple AI-related tasks, such as text analysis, image recognition, and NLP.

With Step Functions and AWS Lambda functions, you can create sophisticated workflows that include AI services and other AWS services. For instance, you can use Amazon S3 to store input data, invoke a Lambda function to trigger an Amazon Transcribe job to transcribe an audio file, and use the output to trigger an Amazon Comprehend analysis job to generate sentiment metadata for the transcribed text. This enables you to create complex, multi-step workflows that are straightforward to manage, scalable, and cost-effective.

The following is an example architecture that shows how Step Functions can help invoke AWS AI services using Lambda functions.

AWS AI Services - Lambda Event Workflow -Unstructured Data

The workflow steps are as follows:

  1. Unstructured data, such as text files, audio files, and video files, are ingested into the S3 raw bucket.
  2. A Lambda function is triggered to read the data from the S3 bucket and call Step Functions to orchestrate the workflow required to extract the metadata.
  3. The Step Functions workflow checks the type of file, calls the corresponding AWS AI service APIs, checks the job status, and performs any postprocessing required on the output.
  4. AWS AI services can be accessed via APIs and invoked as batch jobs. To extract metadata from different types of unstructured data, you can use multiple AI services in sequence, with each service processing the corresponding file type.
  5. After the Step Functions workflow completes the metadata extraction process and performs any required postprocessing, the resulting output is stored in an S3 bucket for cataloging.

Next, let’s understand how can we implement security or access control on both the extracted output as well as the raw input objects.

Implement access control on raw and processed data in Amazon S3

We just consider access controls for three types of data when managing unstructured data: the AI-extracted semi-structured output, the metadata, and the raw unstructured original files. When it comes to AI extracted output, it’s in JSON format and can be restricted via Lake Formation and Amazon DataZone. We recommend keeping the metadata (information that captures which unstructured datasets are already processed by the pipeline and available for analysis) open to your organization, which will enable metadata discovery across the organization.

To control access of raw unstructured data, you can integrate S3 Access Points and explore additional support in the future as AWS services evolve. S3 Access Points simplify data access for any AWS service or customer application that stores data in Amazon S3. Access points are named network endpoints that are attached to buckets that you can use to perform S3 object operations. Each access point has distinct permissions and network controls that Amazon S3 applies for any request that is made through that access point. Each access point enforces a customized access point policy that works in conjunction with the bucket policy that is attached to the underlying bucket. With S3 Access Points, you can create unique access control policies for each access point to easily control access to specific datasets within an S3 bucket. This works well in multi-tenant or shared bucket scenarios where users or teams are assigned to unique prefixes within one S3 bucket.

An access point can support a single user or application, or groups of users or applications within and across accounts, allowing separate management of each access point. Every access point is associated with a single bucket and contains a network origin control and a Block Public Access control. For example, you can create an access point with a network origin control that only permits storage access from your virtual private cloud (VPC), a logically isolated section of the AWS Cloud. You can also create an access point with the access point policy configured to only allow access to objects with a defined prefix or to objects with specific tags. You can also configure custom Block Public Access settings for each access point.

The following architecture provides an overview of how an end-user can get access to specific S3 objects by assuming a specific AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) role. If you have a large number of S3 objects to control access, consider grouping the S3 objects, assigning them tags, and then defining access control by tags.

S3 Access Points - Unstructured Data Management - Access Control

If you are implementing a solution that integrates S3 data available in multiple AWS accounts, you can take advantage of cross-account support for S3 Access Points.

Conclusion

This post explained how you can use AWS AI services to extract readable data from unstructured datasets, build a metadata layer on top of them to allow data discovery, and build an access control mechanism on top of the raw S3 objects and extracted data using Lake Formation, Amazon DataZone, and S3 Access Points.

In addition to AWS AI services, you can also integrate large language models with vector databases to enable semantic or similarity search on top of unstructured datasets. To learn more about how to enable semantic search on unstructured data by integrating Amazon OpenSearch Service as a vector database, refer to Try semantic search with the Amazon OpenSearch Service vector engine.

As of writing this post, S3 Access Points is one of the best solutions to implement access control on raw S3 objects using tagging, but as AWS service features evolve in the future, you can explore alternative options as well.

About the Authors

Sakti Mishra is a Principal Solutions Architect at AWS, where he helps customers modernize their data architecture and define their end-to-end data strategy, including data security, accessibility, governance, and more. He is also the author of the book Simplify Big Data Analytics with Amazon EMR. Outside of work, Sakti enjoys learning new technologies, watching movies, and visiting places with family.

Bhavana Chirumamilla is a Senior Resident Architect at AWS with a strong passion for data and machine learning operations. She brings a wealth of experience and enthusiasm to help enterprises build effective data and ML strategies. In her spare time, Bhavana enjoys spending time with her family and engaging in various activities such as traveling, hiking, gardening, and watching documentaries.

Sheela Sonone is a Senior Resident Architect at AWS. She helps AWS customers make informed choices and trade-offs about accelerating their data, analytics, and AI/ML workloads and implementations. In her spare time, she enjoys spending time with her family—usually on tennis courts.

Daniel Bruno is a Principal Resident Architect at AWS. He had been building analytics and machine learning solutions for over 20 years and splits his time helping customers build data science programs and designing impactful ML products.

Unlock data across organizational boundaries using Amazon DataZone – now generally available 

Post Syndicated from Shikha Verma original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/unlock-data-across-organizational-boundaries-using-amazon-datazone-now-generally-available/

We are excited to announce the general availability of Amazon DataZone. Amazon DataZone enables customers to discover, access, share, and govern data at scale across organizational boundaries, reducing the undifferentiated heavy lifting of making data and analytics tools accessible to everyone in the organization. With Amazon DataZone, data users like data engineers, data scientists, and data analysts can share and access data across AWS accounts using a unified data portal, allowing them to discover, use, and collaborate on this data across their teams and organizations. Additionally, data owners and data stewards can make data discovery simpler by adding business context to data while balancing access governance to the data via pre-defined approval workflows in the user interface.

In this blog post, we share what we heard from our customers that led us to create Amazon DataZone and discuss specific customer use cases and quotes from customers who tried Amazon DataZone during our public preview. Then we explain the benefits of Amazon DataZone and walk you through key features.

Common pain points of data management and governance:

  1. Discovery of data, especially data distributed across accounts and regions – Finding the data to use for analysis is challenging because organizations often have petabytes of data spread across tens or even thousands of data sources.
  2. Access to data – Data access control is hard, managed differently across organizations, and often requires manual approvals which can be time-consuming process and hard to keep up to date, resulting in analysts not having access to the data they need.
  3. Access to tools – Data users want to use different tools of choice with the same governed data. This is challenging because access to data is managed differently by each of the tools.
  4. Collaboration – Analysts, data scientists, and data engineers often own different steps within the end-to-end analytics journey but do not have an simple way to collaborate on the same governed data, using the tools of their choice.
  5. Data governance – Constructs to govern data are hidden within individual tools and managed differently by different teams, preventing organizations from having traceability on who’s accessing what and why.

Three core benefits of Amazon DataZone

Amazon DataZone enables customers to discover, share, and govern data at scale across organizational boundaries.

  • Govern data access across organizational boundaries. Help ensure that the right data is accessed by the right user for the right purpose—in accordance with your organization’s security regulations—without relying on individual credentials. Provide transparency on data asset usage and approve data subscriptions with a governed workflow. Monitor data assets across projects through usage auditing capabilities.
  • Connect data people through shared data and tools to drive business insights. Increase your business team’s efficiency by collaborating seamlessly across teams and providing self-service access to data and analytics tools. Use business terms to search, share, and access cataloged data, making data accessible to all the configured users to learn more about data they want to use with the business glossary.
  • Automate data discovery and cataloging with machine learning (ML). Reduce the time needed to manually enter data attributes into the business data catalog and minimize the introduction of errors. More and richer data in the data catalog improves the search experience, too. Reduce your time searching for and using data from weeks to days.

Here are the core benefits Amazon DataZone provides to its customers.

Figure 1: Benefits of Amazon DataZone

Figure 1: Benefits of Amazon DataZone

To provide theses benefits, let’s see what capabilities are built into this service.

Figure 2: Capabilities of Amazon DataZone

Figure 2: Capabilities of Amazon DataZone

Amazon DataZone provides the following detailed capabilities.

  1. Business-driven domains – A DataZone domain represents the distinct boundary of a line of business (LOB) or a business area within an organization that can manage its own data, including its own data assets, its own definition of data or business terminology, and may have its own governing standards. Domain is the starting point of a customer’s journey with Amazon DataZone. When you first start using DataZone, you create a domain, and all core components, such as business data catalog, projects, and environments, that will exist within a domain.
    1. An Amazon DataZone domain contains an associated business data catalog for search and discovery, a set of metadata definitions to decorate the data assets that are used for discovery purposes, and data projects with integrated analytics and ML tools for users and groups to consume and publish data assets.
    2. An Amazon DataZone domain can span across multiple AWS accounts by connecting and pulling data lake or data warehouse data in these accounts (for example, AWS Glue Data Catalog) to form a data mesh or creating and running projects and environments in these accounts across the supported AWS Regions.
    3. Amazon DataZone domains bring along the capabilities of AWS Resource Access Manager (AWS RAM) to securely share resources across accounts.
    4. After an Amazon DataZone domain is created, the domain provides a browser-based web application where the organization’s configured users can go to catalog, discover, govern, share, and analyze data in a self-service fashion. The data portal supports identity providers through the AWS IAM Identity Center (successor to AWS Single Sign-On) and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) principals for authentication.
    5. For example, a marketing team can create a domain with name “Marketing” and have full ownership over it. Similarly, a sales team can create a domain with name “Sales” and have full ownership over it. When sales wants to share data with marketing, the marketing team can give access to a sales account by associating that account with the marketing domain, and the sales user can use the marketing domain’s Amazon DataZone portal link to share their data with the marketing team.
  2. Organization-wide business data catalog – You can make data visible with business context for your users to find and understand data quickly and efficiently. The core of the catalog is focused on cataloging data from different sources and augmenting that metadata with additional business context to build trust, and facilitate better decision-making for consumers looking for data.
    1. Standardize on terminology – You can standardize your business terminology to communicate among data publishers and consumers by creating glossaries and including detailed descriptions for terms along with the term relationships. These terms can be mapped to assets and columns and help to standardize the description of these assets and assist in the discovery and understanding the details of the underlying data.
    2. Building blocks to customize business metadata – To make it simple to build your catalog with extensibility, Amazon DataZone introduces some foundational building blocks that can be expanded to your needs. The metadata forms types, and asset types can be used as templates for defining your assets. These types can be customized to augment additional context and details to suit the requirements of a domain. In this release, Amazon DataZone provides some out-of-the-box metadata form types such as AWS Glue table form, Amazon Redshift table form, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) object form to support the out-of-box asset types such as AWS Glue tables and views, Amazon Redshift tables and views, and S3 objects.
    3. Catalog structured, unstructured, and custom assets – You can now catalog not only AWS Glue data catalogs or Amazon Redshift tables but also catalog custom assets using Amazon DataZone APIs. Cataloged assets can represent a consumable unit of asset that may include a table, a dashboard, an ML model, or a SQL code block that shows the query behind the dashboard. With custom assets, Amazon DataZone provides the ability to attach metadata form types to an asset type and then augment it with business context, including standardized business glossary terms for better consumption of those assets. In addition, for AWS Glue data catalogs and Amazon Redshift tables, you can use the Amazon DataZone data sources to bring the technical metadata of the datasets into the business data catalog in a managed fashion on a schedule. Assets also now support revisions, allowing users to identify changes to business and technical metadata.
    4. Automated business name generation – Enriching the technical catalog ingested with business context can be time-consuming, cumbersome, and error-prone. To make it simpler, we are introducing the first feature that brings generative artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to Amazon DataZone to automate the generation of the name and column names of an asset. Amazon DataZone recommends to be added to the asset, and then delegates control to the producer to accept or reject those recommendations.
  3. Federated governance using data projects – Amazon DataZone data projects simplify access to AWS analytics by creating business usecase-based groupings of users, data assets, and analytics tools. Data projects provide a space where project members can collaborate, exchange data, and share artifacts. Projects are secure so that only users who are added to the project can collaborate together. With projects, Amazon DataZone decentralizes data ownership among teams depending on who owns the data and also federates access management to those owners when consumers request access to data. Core capabilities made available in projects include:
    1. Ownership and user management – In an organization, the roles and responsibilities made available to different personas vary. To customize defining what a user or group can do when working with Amazon DataZone entities, projects now also serve as a user management or roles mechanism. Every entity in Amazon DataZone, such as glossaries, metadata forms, and assets, is owned by projects.
    2. Projects and environments – Projects are now decoupled from infrastructure – there’s project creation that handles the set up of users as either project owners or contributors, and then the set up of resources named environments. Environments handle infrastructure (for example, AWS Glue database) needed for users to work with the data. This split enables the project to be the use case container, whereas environment gives the flexibility to branch off into different infrastructure environments (for example, data lakes or data warehouses using Amazon Redshift). Administrators can determine what kind of infrastructure should be available for what kind of projects.
    3. Bring your own IAM role for subscription – You can now bring an existing IAM principal by registering it as a subscription target and get data access approval for that IAM user or role.  With this mechanism, projects extend support for working with data in other AWS services because you can allow users to discover data, get the necessary approval, and access the data in a service the user has prior authorization to.
    4. Subscribe workflow with access management – The subscription workflow secures data between producers and consumers to verify only the right data is accessed by the right users for the right purpose, enabling self-service data analytics. This capability also allows you to quickly audit who has access to your datasets for what business use case as well as monitor usage and costs across projects and lines of business. Access management for assets published in the catalog is managed using AWS Lake Formation or Amazon Redshift, and you will get notified (in the portal or in Amazon CloudWatch) if your subscription request was approved and granted. For data that is not managed by AWS Lake Formation or Amazon Redshift, you can manage the subscription approval in Amazon DataZone and complete the access granted workflow with custom logic using Amazon EventBridge events and then report back to Amazon DataZone using API once the grant is completed. This ensures that the consumer will only interface with one service to discover, understand, and subscribe to data that is needed for their analysis.
    5. Analytics tools – Out of the box, the Amazon DataZone portal provides integration with Amazon Athena query editor and Amazon Redshift query editor as tools to process the data. This integration provides seamless access to the query tools and enables the users to use data assets that were subscribed to within the project. This is accomplished using Amazon DataZone environments that can be deployed according to the resource configuration definitions in built-in blueprints.
  4. APIs – Amazon DataZone now has external APIs to work with the system programmatically. You can add Amazon DataZone to your existing architecture. For example, to use your data pipelines to catalog data in Amazon DataZone and enable consumers to search, find, subscribe, and access that data seamlessly. In this release, Amazon DataZone introduces a new data model for the catalog. The catalog APIs support a type system–based model that allows you to define and manage the types of entities in the catalog. Using this type system model, users will have a flexible and scalable catalog that can represent different types of objects and associate metadata to the object (asset or column). Similarly, actions in the UI now have APIs that you can use if you want to work with Amazon DataZone programmatically.

Common customer use cases for Amazon DataZone

Let’s look at some use cases that our preview customers enabled with Amazon DataZone.

Use case 1: Data discoverability 

“Bristol Myers Squibb is actively pursuing an initiative to reduce the time it takes to discover and develop drugs by more than 30%. A key component of this strategy is addressing data sharing challenges and optimizing data availability. Engaging with AWS, we found that Amazon DataZone helped us create our data products, catalog them, and govern them, making our data more findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR). We’re currently assessing the broader applicability of Amazon DataZone within our enterprise framework to determine if it aligns with our operational goals.” 

—David Y. Liu, Director, Research IT Solution Architecture. Bristol Myers Squibb.

Use case 2: Share governed data for generative AI initiatives

“By harmonizing data across multiple business domains, we can foster a culture of data sharing. To this end, we have been using Amazon DataZone to free up our developers from building and maintaining a platform, allowing them to focus on tailored solutions. Utilizing an AWS managed service was important to us for several reasons—combining capabilities within the AWS ecosystem, quicker time to obtain business insights from data analysis, standardized data definitions, and leveraging the potential of generative AI. We look forward to our continued partnership with AWS to generate better outcomes for Guardant Health and the patients we serve. This is more than mere data; it’s our dynamic journey.”

—Rajesh Kucharlapati, Senior Director of Data, CRM and Analytics, Guardant Health

Use case 3:  Federated data governance

“Being data-driven is one of our main corporate objectives, always guided by best practices in data governance, data privacy, and security. At Itaú, data is treated as one of our main assets; good data management and definition are core parts of our solutions, in every use of AWS analytics services. Together with the AWS team, we were able to experiment with Amazon DataZone in preview, proposing features aligned with our technological and business needs. One example is data by domain, a simplification of data governance processes and distribution of responsibilities among business units. With Amazon DataZone generally available to our contributors, we expect to be able to quickly and easily set up rules across domains for teams composed of data analysts, engineers, and scientists, fostering experimentation with data hypothesis across multiple business use cases, with simplified governance.”

—Priscila Cardoso Ferreira, Data Governance and Privacy Superintendent, Itaú Unibanco

Use case 4: Decentralized ownership

“At Holaluz, unifying data across our businesses while having distributed ownership with individual teams to share and govern their data are our key priorities. Our data is owned by different teams, and sharing has typically meant the central team has to grant access, which created a bottleneck in our processes. We needed a faster way to analyze data with decentralized ownership, where data access can be approved by the owning team. We have validated the use cases in Amazon DataZone preview and are looking forward to getting started when it is generally available to build a robust business data catalog. Our consumers will be able to find, subscribe, and publish back their newly created assets for others to discover and use, enabling a data flywheel.”

—Danny Obando, Lead Data Architect, Holaluz

Use case #5: Managed service versus Do-It-Yourself (DIY) platform

“At BTG Pactual, unifying data across our businesses and allowing for data sharing at scale while enforcing oversight is one of our key priorities. While we are building custom solutions to do this ourselves, we prefer having an AWS native service to enable these capabilities so we can focus our development efforts and resources on solving BTG Pactual’s specific governance challenges—rather than building and maintaining the platform. We have validated the use cases in Amazon DataZone preview and will use it to build a robust business data catalog and data sharing workflow. It will provide complete visibility into who is using what data for what purposes without adding additional workload or inhibiting the decentralized ownership we’ve established to make data discoverable and accessible to all our data users across the organization.”

—João Mota, Head of Data Platform, BTG Pactual

Solution walkthrough

Let’s take an example of how an organization can get started with Amazon DataZone. In this example, we build a unified environment for data producers and data consumers to access, share, and consume data in a governed manner.

Take a product marketing team that wants to drive a campaign on product adoption. To be successful in that campaign, they want to tap into the customer data in a data warehouse, click-stream data in the data lake, and performance data of other campaigns in applications like Salesforce. Roberto is a data engineer who knows this data very well. So, let’s see how Roberto will make this data discoverable to others in the organization.

The administrator for the company has already set up a domain called “Marketing” for the team to use. The administrator has also set up some resource templates called “Blueprints” to allow data people to set up environments to work with data. The administrator has also set up users who can sign in using the corporate credentials to the Amazon DataZone portal, a web application outside of AWS Console. The administrator sets up all the AWS resources so the data people do not have to struggle with the technical barriers.

So, let’s now get into the details of how Roberto is able to publish the data in the catalog.

  1. Roberto signs in to the Amazon DataZone portal using his corporate credentials.
  2. He creates a project and environment that he can use to publish data. He knows the data sources he wants to catalog, so he creates a connection to the AWS Glue Catalog that has all the click-stream data.
  3. He provides a name and description for the data source run and then selects databases and specifics of what table he wants to bring.
  4. He chooses the automated metadata generation option to get ML-generated business names for the technical table and column names. He then schedules the run to keep the asset in sync with the source.
  5. Within a few minutes, the click-stream data and the customer information from Amazon Redshift metadata, such as table names, schema, and other source metadata, will be available in Amazon DataZone’s inventory, ready for curation.
  6. Roberto can now enrich the metadata to provide additional business context using glossary and metadata forms to make it simple for Veronica, adata analyst, and other data people to understand the data. Roberto can accept or reject the automatically generated recommendations to autocomplete the business-friendly names. He can also provide descriptions, classify terms, and any other useful information to that particular asset.
  7. Once done, Roberto can publish the asset and make it available to data consumers in Amazon DataZone.

Now, let’s take a look at how Veronica, the marketing analyst, can start discovering and working with the data.

  1. Now that the data is published and available in the catalog, Veronica can sign in to the Amazon DataZone portal using her corporate credentials and start searching for data. She types “click campaign” in the search, and all relevant assets are returned.
  2. She notices that the assets come from various sources and contexts. She uses filters to curate the search list using facets such as glossary terms and data sources and sorts results based on relevance and time.
  3. To start working with data, she will have to create a new project and an environment that provides the tools she needs. Creating the project provides an quick way for her to collaborate with her teammates and automatically provide them with the correct level of permissions to work with data and tools.
  4. Veronica finds the data she needs access to. She now requests access by clicking on Subscribe to inform the data publisher or owner that she needs access to the data. While subscribing, she also provides a reason why she needs access to that data.
  5. This sends a notification to Roberto and his project members that someone is looking for access, and they can review the request to accept or reject it. Robert is signed in to the portal, sees the notification, and approves the request because the reason was very clear.
  6. With the approved subscription, Veronica also gets access to data as Amazon DataZone automatically does it for Roberto. Now Veronica and her team can start working on their analysis to find the right campaign to increase adoption.

Therefore, the entire data discovery and access lifecycle and usage is happening through Amazon DataZone. You get complete visibility and control over how the data is being shared, who is using it, and who authorized it. Essentially, Amazon DataZone allows you to give members of your organization the freedom they always wanted, with the confidence of the right governance around it.

Here is a screenshot of Amazon DataZone’s portal for users to login to catalog, publish, discover, understand, and subscribe to data that is needed for their analysis.

Conclusion

In this post, we discussed the challenges, core capabilities, and a few common use cases. With a sample scenario, we demonstrated how you can get started. Amazon DataZone is now generally available. For more information, see What’s New in Amazon DataZone or Amazon DataZone.

Check out the YouTube playlist for some of the latest demos of Amazon DataZone and short descriptions of the capabilities available.

About the authors

Shikha Verma is Head of Product for Amazon DataZone at AWS.

Steve McPherson is a General Manager with Amazon DataZone at AWS.

Priya Tiruthani is a Senior Product Manager with Amazon DataZone at AWS.

Amazon DataZone Now Generally Available – Collaborate on Data Projects across Organizational Boundaries

Post Syndicated from Channy Yun original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-datazone-now-generally-available-collaborate-on-data-projects-across-organizational-boundaries/

Today, we’re announcing the general availability of Amazon DataZone, a new data management service to catalog, discover, analyze, share, and govern data between data producers and consumers in your organization.

At AWS re:Invent 2022, we preannounced Amazon DataZone, and in March 2023, we previewed it publicly.

During the keynote of the last re:Invent, Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of Databases, Analytics, and Machine Learning at AWS said “I have had the benefit of being an early customer of DataZone to run the AWS weekly business review meeting where we assemble data from our sales pipeline and revenue projections to inform our business strategy.”

During the keynote, a demo led by Shikha Verma, head of product for Amazon DataZone, demonstrated how organizations can use the product to create more effective advertising campaigns and get the most out of their data.

“Every enterprise is made up of multiple teams that own and use data across a variety of data stores. Data people have to pull this data together but do not have an easy way to access or even have visibility to this data. DataZone provides a unified environment where everyone in an organization—from data producers to consumers, can go to access and share data in a governed manner.”

With Amazon DataZone, data producers populate the business data catalog with structured data assets from AWS Glue Data Catalog and Amazon Redshift tables. Data consumers search and subscribe to data assets in the data catalog and share with other business use case collaborators. Consumers can analyze their subscribed data assets with tools—such as Amazon Redshift or Amazon Athena query editors—that are directly accessed from the Amazon DataZone portal. The integrated publishing-and-subscription workflow provides access-auditing capabilities across projects.

Introducing Amazon DataZone
For those of you who aren’t yet familiar with Amazon DataZone, let me introduce you to its key concept and capabilities.

Amazon DataZone Domain represents the distinct boundary of a line of business (LOB) or a business area within an organization that can manage it’s own data, including it’s own data assets and its own definition of data or business terminology, and may have it’s own governing standards. The domain includes all core components such as the data portal, business data catalog, projects and environments, and built-in workflows.

  1. Data portal (outside the AWS Management Console) – This is a web application where different users can go to catalog, discover, govern, share, and analyze data in a self-service fashion. The data portal authenticates users with AWS Identity and Access Manager (IAM) credentials or existing credentials from your identity provider through the AWS IAM Identity Center.
  2. Business data catalog – In your catalog, you can define the taxonomy or the business glossary. You can use this component to catalog data across your organization with business context and thus enable everyone in your organization to find and understand data quickly.
  3. Data projects & environments – You can use projects to simplify access to the AWS analytics by creating business use case–based groupings of people, data assets, and analytics tools. Amazon DataZone projects provide a space where project members can collaborate, exchange data, and share data assets. Within projects, you can create environments that provide the necessary infrastructure to project members such as analytics tools and storage so that project members can easily produce new data or consume data they have access to.
  4. Governance and access control – You can use built-in workflows that allow users across the organization to request access to data in the catalog and owners of the data to review and approve those subscription requests. Once a subscription request is approved, Amazon DataZone can automatically grant access by managing permission at underlying data stores such as AWS Lake Formation and Amazon Redshift.

To learn more, see Amazon DataZone Terminology and Concepts.

Getting Started with Amazon DataZone
To get started, consider a scenario where a product marketing team wants to run campaigns to drive product adoption. To do this, they need to analyze product sales data owned by a sales team. In this walkthrough, the sales team, which acts as the data producer, publishes sales data in Amazon DataZone. Then the marketing team, which acts as the data consumer, subscribes to sales data and analyzes it in order to build a campaign strategy.

To understand how the DataZone works, let’s walk through a condensed version of the Getting started guide for Amazon DataZone.

1. Create a Domain
When you first start using DataZone, you start by creating a domain and all core components such as business data catalog, projects, and environments in the data portal, then exist within that domain. Go to the Amazon DataZone console and choose Create domain.

Enter Domain name and a descrption and leave all other values as default.

For example, in the Service access section, if you choose Create and use a new role by default, Amazon DataZone will automatically create a new role with necessary permissions that authorize DataZone to make API calls on behalf of users within the domain. Check the Quick setup option where DataZone can take care of all the setup steps.

Finally, choose Create domain. Amazon DataZone creates the necessary IAM roles and enables this domain to use resources within your account such as AWS Glue Data Catalog, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon Athena. Domain creation can take several minutes to complete. Wait for the domain to have a status of Available.

2. Create a Project and Environment in the Data Portal
After the domain is successfully created, select it, and on the domain’s summary page, note the data portal URL for the root domain. You can use this URL to access your Amazon DataZone data portal. Choose Open data portal.

To create a new data project as the sales team to publish sales data, choose Create Project.

In the dialogbox, enter “Sales producer project” as the Name, then enter a Description for this project and choose Create.

Once you have the project, you need to create a environment to work with data and analytics tools such as Amazon Athena or Amazon Redshift in this project. Choose Create environment in the overview page or after clicking the Environment tab.

Enter “publish-environment” as the Name, then enter a Description for this environment and choose Environment profile. An environment profile is a pre-defined template that includes technical details required to create an environment such as which AWS account, Region, VPC details, and resources and tools are added to the project.

You can select a couple of default environment profiles. Choosing DataLakeProfile enables you to publish data from your Amazon S3 and AWS Glue based data lakes. It also simplifies querying the AWS Glue tables that you have access to using Amazon Athena.

Next, ignore all the optional parameters and choose Create environment. It takes about a minute for the environment to create certain resources in your AWS account such as IAM roles, an Amazon S3 suffix, AWS Glue databases, and an Athena workgroup, which makes it easier for members of a project to produce and consume data in the data lake.

3. Publish Data in the Data Portal
You have the environment to publish your data in your AWS Glue table. To create this table in Amazon Athena, choose Query data with the Athena link on the right-hand side of the Environments page.

This opens the Athena query editor in a new tab. Select publishenvironment_pub_db from the database dropdown and then paste the following query into the query editor. This will create a table called catalog_sales in the environment’s AWS Glue database.

CREATE TABLE catalog_sales AS 
SELECT 146776932 AS order_number, 23 AS quantity, 23.4 AS wholesale_cost, 45.0 as list_price, 43.0 as sales_price, 2.0 as discount, 12 as ship_mode_sk,13 as warehouse_sk, 23 as item_sk, 34 as catalog_page_sk, 232 as ship_customer_sk, 4556 as bill_customer_sk
UNION ALL SELECT 46776931, 24, 24.4, 46, 44, 1, 14, 15, 24, 35, 222, 4551
UNION ALL SELECT 46777394, 42, 43.4, 60, 50, 10, 30, 20, 27, 43, 241, 4565
UNION ALL SELECT 46777831, 33, 40.4, 51, 46, 15, 16, 26, 33, 40, 234, 4563
UNION ALL SELECT 46779160, 29, 26.4, 50, 61, 8, 31, 15, 36, 40, 242, 4562
UNION ALL SELECT 46778595, 43, 28.4, 49, 47, 7, 28, 22, 27, 43, 224, 4555
UNION ALL SELECT 46779482, 34, 33.4, 64, 44, 10, 17, 27, 43, 52, 222, 4556
UNION ALL SELECT 46779650, 39, 37.4, 51, 62, 13, 31, 25, 31, 52, 224, 4551
UNION ALL SELECT 46780524, 33, 40.4, 60, 53, 18, 32, 31, 31, 39, 232, 4563
UNION ALL SELECT 46780634, 39, 35.4, 46, 44, 16, 33, 19, 31, 52, 242, 4557
UNION ALL SELECT 46781887, 24, 30.4, 54, 62, 13, 18, 29, 24, 52, 223, 4561

You can see the two databases in the dropdown menu. The publishenvironment_pub_db is to provide you with a space to produce new data and choose to publish it to the DataZone catalog. The other one, publishenvironment_sub_db is for project members when they subscribe to or access to data in the catalog within that project.

Make sure that the catalog_sales table is successfully created. Now you have a data asset that can be published into the Amazon DataZone catalog.

As the data producer, you can now go back to the data portal and publish this table into the DataZone catalog. Choose the Data tab in the top menu and Data sources in the left navigation pane.

You can see a default data source automatically created in your environment. When you open this data source, you will see your environments’ publishing database where we just created the catalog_sales table.

This data source will bring in all the tables it finds in the publishing database into the DataZone. By default, automated metadata generation is enabled, which means that any asset that the data source bring into the DataZone will automatically generate the business names of the table and columns for that asset. Choose Run in this data source.

Once the data source has finished running, you can see the catalog sales table in the Data Source Runs.

You can open this asset and see that the publishing job could automatically extract the technical metadata including the schema of the table and several other technical details such as AWS account, Region, and physical location of the data.

If they look correct, you can simply accept these recommendations either by clicking the brain icon in each recommended item or the Accept all button for all recommendations. When you are ready to publish, choose Publish asset and reconfirm in the dialog box.

4. Subscribe Data as a Data Consumer
Now let’s switch the role to a marketing team and see how you can subscribe to or request access this table. Repeat to create a new project called “Marketing consumer project” and a new environment called “subscriber-environment” as the data consumer using the same steps as before.

In the new created project, when you type “catalog sales” in the search bar, you can see the published table in the search results. Choose the Catalog Sales Data.

In the catalog, choose Subscribe.

In the Subscribe to Catalog Sales Data window, select your marketing consumer project, provide a reason for the subscription request, and then choose Subscribe.

When you get a subscription request as a data producer, it will notify you through a task in the sales producer project. Since you are acting as both subscriber and publisher here, you will see a notification.

When you click on this notification, it will open the subscription request including which project has requested access, who the requestor is, and why they need access. Choose Approve and provide a reason for approval.

Now that subscription has been approved, you can see catalog sales data in your marketing consumer project. To confirm this, choose the Data tab in the top menu and Data sources in the left navigation pane.


To analyze your subscribe data, choose the Environments tab in the top menu and Subscribe-environment you created in the marketing consumer project. It shows a new Query Data link in the right pane.

We can see that the catalog sales table is showing up under subscription database.
To make sure that we have access to this table, we can preview it and we can see that the query executes successfully.

This opens the Athena query editor in a new tab. Select subscribeenvironment_sub_db from the database dropdown, and then enter your query into the query editor.

You can now run any queries on the sales data table that you have subscribed to as a consumer (marketing team) and that was published into the business data catalog by a producer (sales team).

For more detailed demos such as publishing AWS Glue tables and Amazon Redshift tables and view, see the YouTube playlist.

What’s New at GA?
During the preview, we had lots of interest and great feedback from customers. I want to quickly review the features and introduce some improvements:

Enterprise-Ready Business Catalog – To add business context and make data discoverable by everyone in the organization, you can customize the catalog with automated metadata generation which uses machine learning to automatically generate business names of data assets and columns within those assets. We also improved metadata curation functionality. At GA, you can attach multiple business glossary terms to assets and glossary terms to individual columns in the asset.

Self-Service for Data Users – To provide data autonomy for users to publish and consume data, you can customize and bring any type of asset to the catalog using APIs. Data publishers can automate metadata discovery through ingestion jobs or manually publish files from Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Data consumers can use faceted search to quickly find and understand the data. Users can be notified of updates in the system or actions to be taken. These events are emitted to the customer’s event bus using Amazon EventBridge to customize actions.

Simplified Access to analysis – At GA, projects will serve as business use case-based logical containers. You can create a project and collaborate on specific business use case-based groupings of people, data, and analytics tools. Within the project, you can create an environment that provides the necessary infrastructure to project members such as analytics tools and storage so that project members can easily produce new data or consume data they have access to. This allows users to add multiple capabilities and analytics tools to the same project depending on their needs.

Governed Data Sharing – Data producers own and manage access to data with a subscription approval workflow that allows consumers to request access and data owners to approve. You can now set up subscription terms to be attached to assets when published and automate subscription grant fulfillment for AWS managed data lakes and Amazon Redshift with customizations using EventBridge events for other sources.

Now Available
Amazon DataZone is now generally available in eleven AWS Regions: US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Canada (Central), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Ireland), Europe (Stockholm), and South America (São Paulo).

You can use the free trial of Amazon DataZone, which includes 50 users at no additional cost for the first 3 calendar months of usage. The free trial starts when you first create an Amazon DataZone domain in an AWS account. If you exceed the number of monthly users during your trial, you will be charged at the standard pricing.

To learn more, visit the product page and user guide. You can send feedback to AWS re:Post for Amazon DataZone or through your usual AWS Support contacts.

— Channy

Five actionable steps to GDPR compliance (Right to be forgotten) with Amazon Redshift

Post Syndicated from Kishore Tata original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/five-actionable-steps-to-gdpr-compliance-right-to-be-forgotten-with-amazon-redshift/

The GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) right to be forgotten, also known as the right to erasure, gives individuals the right to request the deletion of their personally identifiable information (PII) data held by organizations. This means that individuals can ask companies to erase their personal data from their systems and any third parties with whom the data was shared. Organizations must comply with these requests provided that there are no legitimate grounds for retaining the personal data, such as legal obligations or contractual requirements.

Amazon Redshift is a fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service in the cloud. It is designed for analyzing large volumes of data and performing complex queries on structured and semi-structured data. Many customers are looking for best practices to keep their Amazon Redshift analytics environment compliant and have an ability to respond to GDPR right to forgotten requests.

In this post, we discuss challenges associated with implementation and architectural patterns and actionable best practices for organizations to respond to the right to be forgotten request requirements of the GDPR for data stored in Amazon Redshift.

Who does GDPR apply to?

The GDPR applies to all organizations established in the EU and to organizations, whether or not established in the EU, that process the personal data of EU individuals in connection with either the offering of goods or services to data subjects in the EU or the monitoring of behavior that takes place within the EU.

The following are key terms we use when discussing the GDPR:

  • Data subject – An identifiable living person and resident in the EU or UK, on whom personal data is held by a business or organization or service provider
  • Processor – The entity that processes the data on the instructions of the controller (for example, AWS)
  • Controller – The entity that determines the purposes and means of processing personal data (for example, an AWS customer)
  • Personal data – Information relating to an identified or identifiable person, including names, email addresses, and phone numbers

Implementing the right to be forgotten can include the following challenges:

  • Data identification – One of the main challenges is identifying all instances of personal data across various systems, databases, and backups. Organizations need to have a clear understanding of where personal data is being stored and how it is processed to effectively fulfill the deletion requests.
  • Data dependencies – Personal data can be interconnected and intertwined with other data systems, making it challenging to remove specific data without impacting the integrity of functionality of other systems or processes. It requires careful analysis to identify data dependencies and mitigate any potential risks or disruptions.
  • Data replication and backups – Personal data can exist in multiple copies due to data replication and backups. Ensuring the complete removal of data from all these copies and backups can be challenging. Organizations need to establish processes to track and manage data copies effectively.
  • Legal obligations and exemptions – The right to be forgotten is not absolute and may be subject to legal obligations or exemptions. Organizations need to carefully assess requests, considering factors such as legal requirements, legitimate interests, freedom of expression, or public interest to determine if the request can be fulfilled or if any exceptions apply.
  • Data archiving and retention – Organizations may have legal or regulatory requirements to retain certain data for a specific period. Balancing the right to be forgotten with the obligation to retain data can be a challenge. Clear policies and procedures need to be established to manage data retention and deletion appropriately.

Architecture patterns

Organizations are generally required to respond to right to be forgotten requests within 30 days from when the individual submits a request. This deadline can be extended by a maximum of 2 months taking into account the complexity and the number of the requests, provided that the data subject has been informed about the reasons for the delay within 1 month of the receipt of the request.

The following sections discuss a few commonly referenced architecture patterns, best practices, and options supported by Amazon Redshift to support your data subject’s GDPR right to be forgotten request in your organization.

Actionable Steps

Data management and governance

Addressing the challenges mentioned requires a combination of technical, operational, and legal measures. Organizations need to develop robust data governance practices, establish clear procedures for handling deletion requests, and maintain ongoing compliance with GDPR regulations.

Large organizations usually have multiple Redshift environments, databases, and tables spread across multiple Regions and accounts. To successfully respond to a data subject’s requests, organizations should have a clear strategy to determine how data is forgotten, flagged, anonymized, or deleted, and they should have clear guidelines in place for data audits.

Data mapping involves identifying and documenting the flow of personal data in an organization. It helps organizations understand how personal data moves through their systems, where it is stored, and how it is processed. By creating visual representations of data flows, organizations can gain a clear understanding of the lifecycle of personal data and identify potential vulnerabilities or compliance gaps.

Note that putting a comprehensive data strategy in place is not in scope for this post.

Audit tracking

Organizations must maintain proper documentation and audit trails of the deletion process to demonstrate compliance with GDPR requirements. A typical audit control framework should record the data subject requests (who is the data subject, when was it requested, what data, approver, due date, scheduled ETL process if any, and so on). This will help with your audit requests and provide the ability to roll back in case of accidental deletions observed during the QA process. It’s important to maintain the list of users and systems who may get impacted during this process to ensure effective communication.

Data discovery and findability

Findability is an important step of the process. Organizations need to have mechanisms to find the data under consideration in an efficient and quick manner for timely response. The following are some patterns and best practices you can employ to find the data in Amazon Redshift.

Tagging

Consider tagging your Amazon Redshift resources to quickly identify which clusters and snapshots contain the PII data, the owners, the data retention policy, and so on. Tags provide metadata about resources at a glance. Redshift resources, such as namespaces, workgroups, snapshots, and clusters can be tagged. For more information about tagging, refer to Tagging resources in Amazon Redshift.

Naming conventions

As a part of the modeling strategy, name the database objects (databases, schemas, tables, columns) with an indicator that they contain PII so that they can be queried using system tables (for example, make a list of the tables and columns where PII data is involved). Identifying the list of tables and users or the systems that have access to them will help streamline the communication process. The following sample SQL can help you find the databases, schemas, and tables with a name that contains PII:

SELECT
pg_catalog.pg_namespace.nspname AS schema_name,
pg_catalog.pg_class.relname AS table_name,
pg_catalog.pg_attribute.attname AS column_name,
pg_catalog.pg_database.datname AS database_name
FROM
pg_catalog.pg_namespace
JOIN pg_catalog.pg_class ON pg_catalog.pg_namespace.oid = pg_catalog.pg_class.relnamespace
JOIN pg_catalog.pg_attribute ON pg_catalog.pg_class.oid = pg_catalog.pg_attribute.attrelid
JOIN pg_catalog.pg_database ON pg_catalog.pg_attribute.attnum > 0
WHERE
pg_catalog.pg_attribute.attname LIKE '%PII%';

SELECT datname
FROM pg_database
WHERE datname LIKE '%PII%';

SELECT table_schema, table_name, column_name
FROM information_schema.columns
WHERE column_name LIKE '%PII%'

Separate PII and non-PII

Whenever possible, keep the sensitive data in a separate table, database, or schema. Isolating the data in a separate database may not always be possible. However, you can separate the non-PII columns in a separate table, for example, Customer_NonPII and Customer_PII, and then join them with an unintelligent key. This helps identify the tables that contain non-PII columns. This approach is straightforward to implement and keeps non-PII data intact, which can be useful for analysis purposes. The following figure shows an example of these tables.

PII-Non PII Example Tables

Flag columns

In the preceding tables, rows in bold are marked with Forgotten_flag=Yes. You can maintain a Forgotten_flag as a column with the default value as No and update this value to Yes whenever a request to be forgotten is received. Also, as a best practice from HIPAA, do a batch deletion once in a month. The downstream and upstream systems need to respect this flag and include this in their processing. This helps identify the rows that need to be deleted. For our example, we can use the following code:

Delete from Customer_PII where forgotten_flag=“Yes”

Use Master data management system

Organizations that maintain a master data management system maintain a golden record for a customer, which acts as a single version of truth from multiple disparate systems. These systems also contain crosswalks with several peripheral systems that contain the natural key of the customer and golden record. This technique helps find customer records and related tables. The following is a representative example of a crosswalk table in a master data management system.

Example of a MDM Records

Use AWS Lake Formation

Some organizations have use cases where you can share the data across multiple departments and business units and use Amazon Redshift data sharing. We can use AWS Lake Formation tags to tag the database objects and columns and define fine-grained access controls on who can have the access to use data. Organizations can have a dedicated resource with access to all tagged resources. With Lake Formation, you can centrally define and enforce database-, table-, column-, and row-level access permissions of Redshift data shares and restrict user access to objects within a data share.

By sharing data through Lake Formation, you can define permissions in Lake Formation and apply those permissions to data shares and their objects. For example, if you have a table containing employee information, you can use column-level filters to help prevent employees who don’t work in the HR department from seeing sensitive information. Refer to AWS Lake Formation-managed Redshift shares for more details on the implementation.

Use Amazon DataZone

Amazon DataZone introduces a business metadata catalog. Business metadata provides information authored or used by businesses and gives context to organizational data. Data discovery is a key task that business metadata can support. Data discovery uses centrally defined corporate ontologies and taxonomies to classify data sources and allows you to find relevant data objects. You can add business metadata in Amazon DataZone to support data discovery.

Data erasure

By using the approaches we’ve discussed, you can find the clusters, databases, tables, columns, snapshots that contain the data to be deleted. The following are some methods and best practices for data erasure.

Restricted backup

In some use cases, you may have to keep data backed up to align with government regulations for a certain period of time. It’s a good idea to take the backup of the data objects before deletion and keep it for an agreed-upon retention time. You can use AWS Backup to take automatic or manual backups. AWS Backup allows you to define a central backup policy to manage the data protection of your applications. For more information, refer to New – Amazon Redshift Support in AWS Backup.

Physical deletes

After we find the tables that contain the data, we can delete the data using the following code (using the flagging technique discussed earlier):

Delete from Customer_PII where forgotten_flag=“Yes”

It’s a good practice to delete data at a specified schedule, such as once every 25–30 days, so that it is simpler to maintain the state of the database.

Logical deletes

You may need to keep data in a separate environment for audit purposes. You can employ Amazon Redshift row access policies and conditional dynamic masking policies to filter and anonymize the data.

You can use row access policies on Forgotten_flag=No on the tables that contain PII data so that the designated users can only see the necessary data. Refer to Achieve fine-grained data security with row-level access control in Amazon Redshift for more information about how to implement row access policies.

You can use conditional dynamic data masking policies so that designated users can see the redacted data. With dynamic data masking (DDM) in Amazon Redshift, organizations can help protect sensitive data in your data warehouse. You can manipulate how Amazon Redshift shows sensitive data to the user at query time without transforming it in the database. You control access to data through masking policies that apply custom obfuscation rules to a given user or role. That way, you can respond to changing privacy requirements without altering the underlying data or editing SQL queries.

Dynamic data masking policies hide, obfuscate, or pseudonymize data that matches a given format. When attached to a table, the masking expression is applied to one or more of its columns. You can further modify masking policies to only apply them to certain users or user-defined roles that you can create with role-based access control (RBAC). Additionally, you can apply DDM on the cell level by using conditional columns when creating your masking policy.

Organizations can use conditional dynamic data masking to redact sensitive columns (for example, names) where the forgotten flag column value is TRUE, and the other columns display the full values.

Backup and restore

Data from Redshift clusters can be transferred, exported, or copied to different AWS services or outside of the cloud. Organizations should have an effective governance process to detect and remove data to align with the GDPR compliance requirement. However, this is beyond the scope of this post.

Amazon Redshift offers backups and snapshots of the data. After deleting the PII data, organizations should also purge the data from their backups. To do so, you need to restore the snapshot to a new cluster, remove the data, and take a fresh backup. The following figure illustrates this workflow.

It’s good practice to keep the retention period at 29 days (if applicable) so that the backups are cleared after 30 days. Organizations can also set the backup schedule to a certain date (for example, the first of every month).

Backup and Restore

Communication

It’s important to communicate to the users and processes who may be impacted by this deletion. The following query helps identify the list of users and groups who have access to the affected tables:

SELECT
nspname AS schema_name,
relname AS table_name,
attname AS column_name,
usename AS user_name,
groname AS group_name
FROM pg_namespace
JOIN pg_class ON pg_namespace.oid = pg_class.relnamespace
JOIN pg_attribute ON pg_class.oid = pg_attribute.attrelid
LEFT JOIN pg_group ON pg_attribute.attacl::text LIKE '%' || groname || '%'
LEFT JOIN pg_user ON pg_attribute.attacl::text LIKE '%' || usename || '%'
WHERE
pg_attribute.attname LIKE '%PII%'
AND (usename IS NOT NULL OR groname IS NOT NULL);

Security controls

Maintaining security is of great importance in GDPR compliance. By implementing robust security measures, organizations can help protect personal data from unauthorized access, breaches, and misuse, thereby helping maintain the privacy rights of individuals. Security plays a crucial role in upholding the principles of confidentiality, integrity, and availability of personal data. AWS offers a comprehensive suite of services and features that can support GDPR compliance and enhance security measures.

The GDPR does not change the AWS shared responsibility model, which continues to be relevant for customers. The shared responsibility model is a useful approach to illustrate the different responsibilities of AWS (as a data processor or subprocessor) and customers (as either data controllers or data processors) under the GDPR.

Under the shared responsibility model, AWS is responsible for securing the underlying infrastructure that supports AWS services (“Security of the Cloud”), and customers, acting either as data controllers or data processors, are responsible for personal data they upload to AWS services (“Security in the Cloud”).

AWS offers a GDPR-compliant AWS Data Processing Addendum (AWS DPA), which enables you to comply with GDPR contractual obligations. The AWS DPA is incorporated into the AWS Service Terms.

Article 32 of the GDPR requires that organizations must “…implement appropriate technical and organizational measures to ensure a level of security appropriate to the risk, including …the pseudonymization and encryption of personal data[…].” In addition, organizations must “safeguard against the unauthorized disclosure of or access to personal data.” Refer to the Navigating GDPR Compliance on AWS whitepaper for more details.

Conclusion

In this post, we delved into the significance of GDPR and its impact on safeguarding privacy rights. We discussed five commonly followed best practices that organizations can reference for responding to GDPR right to be forgotten requests for data that resides in Redshift clusters. We also highlighted that the GDPR does not change the AWS shared responsibility model.

We encourage you to take charge of your data privacy today. Prioritizing GPDR compliance and data privacy will not only strengthen trust, but also build customer loyalty and safeguard personal information in digital era. If you need assistance or guidance, reach out to an AWS representative. AWS has teams of Enterprise Support Representatives, Professional Services Consultants, and other staff to help with GDPR questions. You can contact us with questions. To learn more about GDPR compliance when using AWS services, refer to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Center. To learn more about the right to be forgotten, refer to Right to Erasure.

Disclaimer: The information provided above is not a legal advice. It is intended to showcase commonly followed best practices. It is crucial to consult with your organization’s privacy officer or legal counsel and determine appropriate solutions.

About the Authors

YaduKishore ProfileYadukishore Tatavarthi  is a Senior Partner Solutions Architect supporting Healthcare and life science customers at Amazon Web Services. He has been helping the customers over the last 20 years in building the enterprise data strategies, advising customers on cloud implementations, migrations, reference architecture creation, data modeling best practices, data lake/warehouses architecture, and other technical processes.

Sudhir GuptaSudhir Gupta is a Principal Partner Solutions Architect, Analytics Specialist at AWS with over 18 years of experience in Databases and Analytics. He helps AWS partners and customers design, implement, and migrate large-scale data & analytics (D&A) workloads. As a trusted advisor to partners, he enables partners globally on AWS D&A services, builds solutions/accelerators, and leads go-to-market initiatives

Deepak SinghDeepak Singh is a Senior Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services with 20+ years of experience in Data & AIA. He enjoys working with AWS partners and customers on building scalable analytical solutions for their business outcomes. When not at work, he loves spending time with family or exploring new technologies in analytics and AI space.

AWS Week in Review: Public Preview of Amazon DataZone and AWS DataSync Updates – April 3, 2023

Post Syndicated from Channy Yun original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-week-in-review-public-preview-of-amazon-datazone-and-aws-datasync-updates-april-3-2023/

Last weekend, I enjoyed the spring vibes at Seoul Forest, a large park in the middle of Seoul city, where cherry blossoms are in full bloom.

Compared to last year, there were crowds of people, so I realized that it was really back to normal after the pandemic. I hope you all enjoy the season of spring or fall with your family.

Last Week’s Launches
Like an April Fool’s Day joke, there were 65 launches last week, far more than usual. AWS product teams are working hard with a customer obsession.

So, I had a lot of trouble choosing the important ones. Other than the ones I’ve picked out, there may be important feature releases that fit your needs. Be sure to take a look at the full launches list in the last week.

First, here is a list of the general availability of AWS services and features treated by AWS News Blog:

Let’s take a look at some launches from the last week that I want to remind you of:

The Preview of Amazon DataZone – At AWS re:Invent 2022, we preannounced Amazon DataZone, a new data management service to catalog, discover, analyze, share, and govern data between data producers and consumers in the organization. You can now try out the public preview of Amazon DataZone.

Data producers populate the business data catalog from AWS Glue Data Catalog and Amazon Redshift tables. Data consumers search for and subscribe to data assets in the data catalog and analyze with tools such as Amazon Athena query editors in the Amazon DataZone portal. To get started with Amazon DataZone, see our Quick Start Guide to include sample datasets to implement a complete use case.

AWS DataSync Supports Azure Blob Storage in Preview – AWS DataSync supports copying your object data at scale from Azure Blob Storage to AWS storage services such as Amazon S3. AWS DataSync supports all blob types within Azure Blob Storage and can also be used with Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS) Gen 2.

In addition to Azure Blob Storage, DataSync supports Google Cloud Storage and Azure Files storage locations as well as various general storage systems and AWS storage services. To learn more, see Migrating Azure Blob Storage to Amazon S3 using AWS DataSync in the AWS Storage Blog.

On-call schedules with AWS Systems Manager Incident Manager – You can now configure or change on-call rotation schedules with a group of contacts and have 24/7 coverage and responsiveness for critical issues in the Incident Manager console.

AWS Incident Manager helps you bring the right people and information together when a critical issue is detected, activating preconfigured response plans to engage responders using SMS, phone calls, and chat channels, as well as to run AWS Systems Manager Automation runbooks. To learn how to get started with an-call schedules in Incident Manager, see our Working with on-call schedules in Incident Manager in the AWS documentation.

AWS CloudShell Colsone Toolbar – You can now use AWS Cloudshell Console Toolbar with AWS Management Console in a single view. The Console Toolbar maintains its state (e.g., open, closed) and commands will continue to run in CloudShell as you navigate between services in the Console. For example, it allows you to run a command in CloudShell and view a CloudWatch alarm in the Console at the same time.

After signing into the Console, you can access CloudShell in the lower left of the Console by selecting the CloudShell icon in the Console Toolbar.

New Features of AWS Well-Architected Tool – The Consolidated Report and Enhanced Search enable customers to quickly identify risk themes across their workloads and scale improvements across their organization. This macro-level view helps executive stakeholders understand where common issues lie and prioritize team resources to drive widespread improvement. To learn more, see AWS Well-Architected Tool Dashboard in the AWS documentation.

For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New at AWS page.

Other AWS News
Here are some other news items that you may find interesting from the last week:

Welcome to the .NET on AWS Blog – We launched a new blog channel for millions of .NET developers across the world. Blog posts will also cover built-for-the-cloud development, modernizing .NET Framework applications, and how to deploy .NET workloads on different AWS services. We will use this channel to share news on the work we’ve done with the .NET open-source community, post follow-ups from important events, and post announcements about upcoming presentations from our .NET developer advocates. To learn more, visit our .NET on AWS website and follow us on Twitter at @dotnetonAWS.

AWS Knowledge Center in AWS re:Post – You can now access trusted, authoritative articles and videos of AWS Knowledge Center on AWS re:Post to get answers to technical questions. Knowledge Center content is produced by an AWS team and covers the most frequent questions and requests from AWS customers. These articles are available in 10 localized languages: English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, and Traditional Chinese.

TF1’s FIFA Worldcup Digital Broadcasting Story – Sébastien shared an awesome story about how the French broadcaster TF1 use AWS Cloud technology and expertise to bring the FIFA World Cup to millions of people. He shared the history of redesigning its digital broadcasting architecture on AWS, testing the new platform on large-scale sporting events. For the preparation of the FIFA Worldcup event, TF1 enhanced monitoring to detect anomalies during the event and established the backup plan in a “war room” for the worst scenario. Even if you’re not a fan of football, I recommend reading the behind-the-scenes of the FIFA Worldcup Finals. It’s long but really fun!

Upcoming AWS Events
Check your calendars and sign up for these AWS-led events:

AWS re:Inforce 2023 – Now register AWS re:Inforce, in Anaheim, California, June 13–14. AWS Chief Information Security Officer CJ Moses will share the latest innovations in cloud security and what AWS Security is focused on. The breakout sessions will provide real-world examples of how security is embedded into the way businesses operate. To learn more and get the limited discount code to register, see CJ’s blog post of Gain insights and knowledge at AWS re:Inforce 2023 in the AWS Security Blog.

AWS Global Summits – Check your calendars and sign up for the AWS Summit closest to your city: Paris and Sydney (April 4), Seoul (May 3-4), Berlin and Singapore (May 4), Stockholm (May 11), Hong Kong (May 23), Amsterdam (June 1), London (June 7), Madrid (June 15), and Milano (June 22).

AWS Community Day – Join community-led conferences driven by AWS user group leaders closest to your city: Peru (April 15), Helsinki (April 20), Chicago (June 15), Philippines (June 29–30), and Munich (September 14). Recently, we are bringing together AWS user groups from around the world into Meetup Pro accounts. Find your group and its meetups in your city!

You can browse all upcoming AWS-led in-person and virtual events, and developer-focused events such as AWS DevDay.

That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Week in Review!

— Channy

This post is part of our Week in Review series. Check back each week for a quick roundup of interesting news and announcements from AWS!