multi-account

Secure Cross-Account Data Sharing on AWS (2026): Lake Formation, LF-Tags, and Data Mesh Without Copying the Lake

Copying curated Parquet into every consumer account is how data platforms drown in storage cost and permission sprawl. On Feb 11, 2026 AWS shipped Lake Formation cross-account version 5, which adds wildcard RAM shares for hundreds of thousands of tables. A composite 12-account platform cut duplicate curated copies from 3 to 0 and dropped cross-account access tickets from ~11/month to ~3 by standardizing LF-Tags + resource links.