Authorizing connections through AWS Lake Formation - Amazon QuickSight

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Authorizing connections through AWS Lake Formation

 Applies to: Enterprise Edition 
   Intended audience: System administrators 

If you are querying data with Amazon Athena, you can use AWS Lake Formation to simplify how you secure and connect to your data from Amazon QuickSight. Lake Formation adds to the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) permissions model by providing its own permissions model that is applied to AWS analytics and machine learning services. This centrally defined permissions model controls data access at a granular level through a simple grant and revoke mechanism. You can use Lake Formation instead of, or in addition to, using scoped-down policies with IAM.

When you set up Lake Formation, you register your data sources to allow it to move the data into a new data lake in Amazon S3. Lake Formation and Athena both work seamlessly with AWS Glue Data Catalog, making it easy to use them together. Athena databases and tables are metadata containers. These containers describe the underlying schema of the data, the data definition language (DDL) statements, and the location of the data in Amazon S3.

The following diagram shows the relationships of the AWS services involved.

After Lake Formation is configured, you can use Amazon QuickSight to access databases and tables by name or through SQL queries. Amazon QuickSight provides a full-featured editor where you can write SQL queries. Or you can use the Athena console, the AWS CLI, or your favorite query editor. For more information, see Accessing Athena in the Amazon Athena User Guide.

Enabling connection from Lake Formation

Before you begin using this solution with Amazon QuickSight, make sure that you can access your data using Athena with Lake Formation. After you verify that the connection is working through Athena, you need to verify only that Amazon QuickSight can connect to Athena. Doing this means you don't have to troubleshoot connections through all three products at once. One easy way to test the connection is to use the Athena query console to run a simple SQL command, for example SELECT 1 FROM table.

To set up Lake Formation, the person or team who works on it needs access to create a new IAM role and to Lake Formation. They also need the information shown in the following list. For more information, see Setting up lake formation in the AWS Lake Formation Developer Guide.

  • Collect the Amazon Resource Names (ARNs) of the Amazon QuickSight users and groups that need to access the data in Lake Formation. These users should be Amazon QuickSight authors or administrators.

    To find Amazon QuickSight user and group ARNs
    1. Use the AWS CLI to find user ARNs for Amazon QuickSight authors and admins. To do this, run the following list-users command in your terminal (Linux or Mac) or at your command prompt (Windows).

      aws quicksight list-users --aws-account-id 111122223333 --namespace default --region us-east-1

      The response returns information for each user. We show the Amazon Resource Name (ARN) in bold in the following example.

      RequestId: a27a4cef-4716-48c8-8d34-7d3196e76468 Status: 200 UserList: - Active: true Arn: arn:aws:quicksight:us-east-1:111122223333:user/default/SaanviSarkar Email: SaanviSarkar@example.com PrincipalId: federated/iam/AIDAJVCZOVSR3DESMJ7TA Role: ADMIN UserName: SaanviSarkar

      To avoid using the AWS CLI, you can construct the ARNs for each user manually.

    2. (Optional) Use the AWS CLI to find ARNs for Amazon QuickSight groups by running the following list-group command in your terminal (Linux or Mac) or at your command prompt (Windows).

      aws quicksight list-groups --aws-account-id 111122223333 --namespace default --region us-east-1

      The response returns information for each group. The ARN appears in bold in the following example.

      GroupList: - Arn: arn:aws:quicksight:us-east-1:111122223333:group/default/DataLake-Scorecard Description: Data Lake for CXO Balanced Scorecard GroupName: DataLake-Scorecard PrincipalId: group/d-90671c9c12/6f9083c2-8400-4389-8477-97ef05e3f7db RequestId: c1000198-18fa-4277-a1e2-02163288caf6 Status: 200

      If you don't have any Amazon QuickSight groups, add a group by using the AWS CLI to run the create-group command. There currently isn't an option to do this from the Amazon QuickSight console. For more information, see Creating and managing groups in Amazon QuickSight.

      To avoid using the AWS CLI, you can construct the ARNs for each group manually.

Enabling connection from Amazon QuickSight

To work with Lake Formation and Athena, make sure that you have AWS resource permissions configured in Amazon QuickSight:

  • Enable access to Amazon Athena.

  • Enable access to the correct buckets in Amazon S3. Usually S3 access is enabled when you enable Athena. However, because you can change S3 permissions outside of that process, it's a good idea to verify them separately.

For information about how to verify or change AWS resource permissions in Amazon QuickSight, see Allowing autodiscovery of AWS resources and Accessing data sources.