Amazon S3 Tables & Apache Iceberg: Native Lakehouse in S3 — 14 Months Later

Amazon S3 Tables promised to eliminate the operational scaffolding of Apache Iceberg on S3 — automatic compaction, native REST catalog, managed snapshot lifecycle. Fourteen months after the re:Invent 2024 announcement, this is the enterprise practitioner assessment: what teams migrated from traditional S3 + Glue Catalog setups, the Lake Formation column masking gap that affects regulated workloads, and the migration decision framework for data engineering teams evaluating the switch.

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