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Data Lake Formation:What is DLF?

Last Updated:Oct 29, 2025

Data Lake Formation (DLF) offers a unified, fully managed platform for data and metadata management, and storage. In addition, it provides data access control and storage analysis and optimization. DLF seamlessly integrates with multiple Alibaba Cloud's big data analytics engines to break down data silos. With DLF, you can quickly build and manage cloud-native data lakes and OpenLake solutions. By unifying metadata, lake table formats, and storage management, DLF significantly simplifies O&M for building and managing data lakes, enabling businesses to focus on business innovation and data insights.

Product overview

Product series

Description

DLF (Recommended)

Based on fully managed Paimon catalogs, it supports metadata management, access control, and storage optimization.

DLF-Legacy

Provides a fully managed metadata management service highly compatible with open-source projects. It supports metadata management, access control, and data storage dashboards.

Selection recommendations

Note

We recommend that you use DLF for new applications.

Product series

Scenarios

DLF (Recommended)

Built on Apache Paimon for managing data and metadata. Supports multiple storage optimization strategies, ensures data security, and streamlines data lake management.

Ideal for lakehouse use cases.

DLF-Legacy

Intended for existing DLF-Legacy users only.