AWS Data Exchange

Participants

When exchanging data, there are two main participants involved.

Data senders and providers

These are the individuals or organizations who own the data sets and want to share them over the AWS Marketplace to the wider audience. They can use two mechanisms to offer their data; data grants and data products:

• Data grant: It is a unit of exchange on Data Exchange and can be considered a permission slip. It consists of the following components:

  • Dataset: The dataset shared by the sender. It represents curated collections of information from the data sender and can be in various structured formats like files, API access, or data stored in services like Amazon S3 or Redshift.

  • Grant details: These include the name and description of the data.

  • Recipient access details: It specifies the time for which the access will last. The receiver then needs to explicitly accept the grant to access the data.

• Data products: It is a unit of exchange on AWS Marketplace and a collection of data sets offered by the provider. It has the following components:

  • Product details: It includes details like a name, short and long descriptions, data samples, a logo, and contact information for the provider.

  • Subscription offers: Like any other product on a marketplace, the provider defines pricing and subscription options. Subscribers can then browse, find relevant data products, and subscribe to them for a fee.

  • Data sets: A data product can contain one or more datasets.

Data subscribers or receivers

These are the individuals or organizations who want to access data sets for their analytics and machine learning needs. They can discover and find relevant data products offered by data providers, pay a subscription fee set by the data provider to gain access to the datasets and receive permission from data senders to access specific data sets directly. Moreover, they can track and manage their data grants and subscriptions.

Use case: Subscribing to dataset

To further understand, let’s consider a use case scenario where a financial organization specializes in providing investment advisory services to its clients and relies on high-quality financial data to make informed investment decisions. However, sourcing, managing, and analyzing diverse financial datasets can be time-consuming and resource-intensive.

Therefore, they head over to the AWS Marketplace catalog to discover various financial data products and find one reputable source. The source has its data in an S3 bucket for which it creates a data product and publishes it to AWS Data Exchange to make data available for subscription. When publishing a data product, the provider specifies the location of the data along with some other details in their S3 bucket. This essentially establishes a link between the data in the S3 bucket and the data product in AWS Data Exchange.

The financial organization can easily subscribe to datasets and data products directly from the data catalog. The data catalog seamlessly integrates with other AWS services, such as AWS Glue, Athena, Quicksight, and more. This allows customers to leverage AWS Data Exchange datasets within their data analytics, machine learning, and other data processing workflows.

Furthermore, it provides data providers with a monetization opportunity on their own terms and conditions.