Alation integration - Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio

Alation integration

The integration between Amazon SageMaker Catalog and Alation synchronizes catalog metadata between both systems. Alation is a data intelligence platform that helps organizations make data discoverable, governed, and actionable. This integration creates a unified metadata experience where technical teams working in Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio and business teams working in Alation collaborate on top of the same metadata. For detailed setup instructions, see Build a trusted foundation for data and AI using Alation and Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio.

Capabilities

The current phase of the Alation integration extracts metadata from Amazon SageMaker Catalog into Alation. The integration synchronizes the following metadata:

  • Domains, projects, and asset names.

  • Descriptions, owners, and glossary terms.

  • Custom metadata fields (metadata forms).

  • Provenance metadata, including the originating service, the actor who made the change, and the timestamp.

You can run metadata extractions on demand or schedule them to run automatically. The system performs an initial bulk extraction and then keeps data current through incremental updates.

How it works

The integration connects through AWS Identity and Access Management authentication. You can use either an IAM role (recommended) or an IAM user with access keys. The connector uses scoped IAM permissions following least-privilege principles. Communication uses encrypted APIs, and only metadata is synchronized. Your data files and artifacts remain in their original AWS locations.

You set up this integration by installing the SageMaker enhanced connector in Alation and configuring a data source connection.