News

New AWS Data Exchange Offers Third-Party Data Set Subscription Service

• By David Ramel
• 11/14/2019

Amazon Web Services this week announced AWS Data Exchange, providing subscriptions to third-party data in the cloud from a variety of data providers, which can be used in numerous analytics, machine learning and other services.

The new AWS Data Exchange builds on the cloud giant's earlier efforts to provide customers with data sets, such as the Registry of Open Data on AWS.

The two-pronged service targets both cloud consumers and qualified data providers, with the latter including Reuters, Dun & Bradstreet, Foursquare, TransUnion, IMDb and many more.

On the consumer side, once customers find and subscribe to free or paid data sets, they can be stored in Amazon S3 storage buckets and used -- via a special API -- in a variety of cloud-based analytics services, such as big data processing with Amazon EMR, data warehousing with Amazon Redshift, ad-hoc query with Amazon Athena, data integration and ETL with AWS Glue, and building data lakes with AWS Lake Formation, as well as machine learning services.

Customers can choose from more than 1,000 data products from more than 80 providers on the AWS Marketplace.

"Data products cover a wide range of industries including financial services, healthcare, life sciences, geospatial, consumer, media & entertainment, and more," AWS announced in a Nov. 13 post. "Prior to subscribing to a data product, customers can review the price and terms of use that providers make publicly available. Once subscribed, customers can use the AWS Data Exchange API or console to load data they subscribe to directly into Amazon S3 to use across the broadest and deepest portfolio of cloud services."

AWS spokesperson Jeff Barr penned his own post to provide details on the new service from both subscriber and provider vantage points. "AWS Data Exchange is available now and you can start using it today," he said. "If you own some interesting data and would like to publish it, start here (AWS Console). If you are a developer, browse the product catalog and look for data that will add value to your product."