Data & Analytics

For a retailer DW exit (~42 TB logical, 18 nightly Glue jobs), Aurora→Redshift zero-ETL retired 11 jobs and cut dashboard freshness from 6h → ~15 min — concurrency scaling on zero-ETL (March 2026) absorbed Monday open spikes.

On a multi-domain retailer (~4,200 Glue tables, 11 AWS accounts), publishing a stewardship RACI plus SageMaker Catalog subscriptions cut mean time-to-data-access from 19 days to 4 days — without replacing Lake Formation enforcement.

For a specialty retailer (~380 stores, 2.4M loyalty members), S3 Tables Iceberg silver plus Kinesis cart events cut dashboard refresh from 26 hours to 22 minutes — conversion reporting error dropped from 11% to 2%.

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.

Amazon QuickSight can replace expensive BI tools or become a costly mistake — depending on how you use it. Here is the production guide that covers SPICE, multi-tenancy, cost control, and the cases where QuickSight is the wrong choice.

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

Kinesis Data Streams and Amazon MSK both handle real-time streaming on AWS, but they serve different architectures. Here is how to choose between them for your workload.