Over the past few years, the Lakehouse architecture has become the gold standard for managing modern data workloads. By combining the low-cost storage of data lakes with the reliability and performance of data warehouses, Lakehouses have redefined how organizations unify analytics, AI, and machine learning.
But as enterprises grow, so do their data landscapes. Data no longer resides in a single lakehouse. Instead, it is distributed across multiple systems i.e clouds, warehouses, and even legacy platforms. This is where the concept of a Lakehouse Federation enters the picture, extending the power of the lakehouse into a connected, cross-platform ecosystem.
What is a Lakehouse?
A Lakehouse is a single platform that combines the flexibility of a data lake (to store unstructured, semi-structured, and structured data) with the performance features of a data warehouse (like ACID transactions, governance, and query optimization).
With Delta Lake as its foundation, the Lakehouse allows organizations to
- Store raw and curated data in one place.
- Run BI queries alongside ML and AI workloads.
- Ensure reliability with features like schema enforcement, time travel, and versioning.
In simple words, the Lakehouse reduces data silos by unifying analytics and AI on one platform.
What is a Lakehouse Federation?
While a single Lakehouse is powerful, enterprises often have multiple data platforms for example, Databricks Lakehouse, Snowflake, Google BigQuery, or on-prem systems. Migrating all data into one system is not always practical.
This is where Lakehouse Federation comes in. It allows a lakehouse platform to query and manage data across different systems without moving it. Think of it as a control plane that extends governance, security, and query capabilities to external sources.
With Lakehouse Federation, you can
- Query data in external warehouses or lakes from your lakehouse.
- Apply centralized governance policies across multiple platforms.
- Reduce duplication and avoid costly data migrations.
The Key Difference
- Lakehouse: Focuses on unifying data storage and processing within a single platform.
- Lakehouse Federation: Expands this unification across multiple platforms, enabling a single point of access, governance, and analytics over distributed data.
Final Thoughts
The Lakehouse solved the problem of data silos inside organizations. Lakehouse Federation solves the next challenge - silos across platforms. As enterprises adopt multi-cloud and hybrid strategies, federation ensures agility, governance, and faster insights without forcing all data into one system.
