Which AWS Services Implement a Data Mesh with Centralized Governance?
A financial company wants to implement a data mesh. The data mesh must support centralized data governance, data analysis, and data access control. The company has decided to use AWS Glue for data catalogs and extract, transform, and load (ETL) operations. Which combination of AWS services will implement a data mesh? (Choose two.)
Community Votes
100% of anonymous learners picked answer BE. Votes are pick records left by other test-takers — they are not the verified answer.
Community Insight
The question tests whether you can map data mesh building blocks to storage, analytics, and centralized governance; the trap is choosing Glue DataBrew because it shares the Glue brand but is a data-preparation tool, not a governance layer.
A data mesh on AWS is built with Amazon S3 as the scalable storage layer, Athena for serverless analysis, and Lake Formation for centralized governance and access control. This page confirms why options B and E are correct and why DataBrew, Aurora, RDS, and EMR do not satisfy the stated requirements.
The most common wrong answer is C: AWS Glue DataBrew sounds governance-adjacent because it is in the Glue family, but it is a visual data-preparation service, while Lake Formation provides the centralized access control and governance the scenario requires.
Community Discussion (12 comments)
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Expert Analysis
Why the Answer Is Correct
A data mesh requires domain-oriented data storage, a query and analytics layer, and centralized governance and access control. Amazon S3 is the durable, scalable storage layer for a data lake, and Athena provides serverless query over S3, which fits the analysis requirement without provisioning a cluster. AWS Glue Data Catalog can catalog S3 data, while Lake Formation provides centralized permissions, fine-grained access control, and governance across the lake. Together B and E complete the architecture alongside Glue ETL.Why the Other Options Are Wrong
A uses Aurora and a provisioned Redshift cluster; Aurora is relational and OLTP-oriented, and a provisioned Redshift cluster is not the serverless analytics layer described, while neither option addresses centralized governance. C wrongly casts Glue DataBrew as governance and access control; as alexua noted, "AWS Glue DataBrew is a visual data preparation tool" for cleaning and normalizing data. D uses RDS and EMR; RDS is relational and EMR is a big-data processing framework, but the pair still leaves centralized governance and access control unaddressed. B and E are the only pair that explicitly covers storage, analysis, and centralized governance in the scenario.Community Comment Notes
Learners overwhelmingly landed on B and E, with milofficial summarizing the exam heuristic as "the keyword data mesh means S3, the keyword data governance means LakeFormation". alexua reinforced the elimination of DataBrew by describing it as visual data preparation rather than governance. ninomfr64 added a real-world caveat that DataZone or newer unified tooling may be used in practice, but for this exam scenario S3, Athena, and Lake Formation align with the stated services. The consensus is useful context, but the answer rests on the requirement mapping, not the vote count.Official Reference
Exam Strategy
When a data mesh question pairs Glue with governance, separate the three asks: storage, analytics, and centralized permissions. S3 plus Athena plus Lake Formation is the canonical AWS data-lake trio; reject Glue DataBrew unless the stem explicitly mentions visual data preparation or cleaning.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is AWS Glue DataBrew wrong for centralized governance?
DataBrew is a visual data-preparation service for cleaning and normalizing data; it does not provide the centralized access-control and governance layer that Lake Formation does.
Why are Aurora and Amazon RDS not the storage layer in this data mesh?
They are relational databases suited to transactional workloads, while a data mesh data lake needs scalable object storage such as Amazon S3 for diverse domain datasets.
Related Analysis
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