Lake Formation simplifies the creation of Data Lakes, pools of data where multiple data sources are brought together for analytics. It sits on top of AWS Glue, the data goes from Glue to your Data Lake. You can have fine grain access control, row and column level. A key usage of Lake Formation is the ability to manage permissions for access to your data for analytics in one location instead of managing permissions on DynamoDB, RDS, S3, etc. The access control is managed within Lake Formation itself while the Data Lake is an S3 bucket.