amazon-athena

Copying curated Parquet into every consumer account is how data platforms drown in storage cost and permission sprawl. On Feb 11, 2026 AWS shipped Lake Formation cross-account version 5 — wildcard RAM shares for hundreds of thousands of tables. A composite 12-account platform cut duplicate curated copies from 3 to 0 and dropped cross-account access tickets from ~11/month to ~3 by standardizing LF-Tags + resource links.

Virtual data modeling on AWS: Athena/Redshift semantic views without copies. July 2026 — when VDM works, when it burns Athena dollars.

Athena still bills ~$5/TB scanned (or Capacity Reservations by DPU). July 2026 refresh — partitions, Parquet/Iceberg, workgroups, and when provisioned capacity wins.

S3 + Glue + Athena is the canonical AWS data-lake stack. It's also the one teams over-engineer the fastest. A reference architecture with the partitioning scheme, the Glue crawler config, and the Athena cost guardrails that keep query bills predictable as the lake grows.