Dremio Cloud is a fully managed lakehouse and federation platform deployed into AWS or Azure. Dremio manages the control plane, while customers retain control of data sources and compute through secure connectivity and delegated execution. This model reduces infrastructure-management work while preserving access to distributed data. section 8.4.1
The platform provides SQL access across cloud storage, relational and NoSQL databases, warehouses, and open table formats such as Apache Iceberg. It queries data in place rather than requiring prior movement or replication, making federation useful for interactive analytics and dashboard workloads. section 8.3.1 section 8.3.3
Dremio Cloud combines several lakehouse responsibilities:
- Provides a semantic layer for governed datasets, reusable business logic, joins, filters, and consistent metric definitions across downstream tools. section 8.3 section 8.5.3
- Supports an integrated Apache Iceberg catalog powered by Apache Polaris, with native table management and interoperability through the Iceberg REST Catalog API. section 8.3.3 section 8.4.1
- Improves analytical performance through Apache Arrow columnar execution, reflections, caching, metadata pruning, and elastic scaling of query executors. section 8.3.2 section 8.3.4
- Exposes data through SQL, JDBC, ODBC, REST, Apache Arrow Flight, Python clients, and Model Context Protocol integrations. section 8.3.1
Cloud-managed deployment differs from Community and Enterprise self-managed editions. Self-managed installations place operations, infrastructure, and Kubernetes responsibilities with the organization; Dremio Cloud supplies the managed control plane while retaining Enterprise-level capabilities such as elastic scaling, reflection management, the integrated catalog, and a built-in AI Agent. section 8.4.1
Hybrid Iceberg modernization
An organization can connect on-premises Hadoop data and Azure Data Lake Storage while gradually moving storage and workloads to the cloud. Dremio federates both environments, applies semantic governance, and accelerates Iceberg tables without requiring a disruptive lift-and-shift migration. section 8.5.6
Governed customer reporting
A SaaS provider can connect tenant-filtered Iceberg datasets to embedded dashboards and REST or Arrow Flight APIs. Centralized governance, tenant isolation, caching, auditing, and rate limits support self-service access without duplicating each customer's data. section 9.5.8
Figure 8.6 Dremio can connect to databases, data warehouses, data lakes, and lakehouse catalogs, letting you model your data in its semantic layer and manage Iceberg tables in its built-in catalog, and then use common interfaces to connect to your favorite tooling.
Use the architecture diagram to trace Dremio’s position between databases, data lakes, lakehouse catalogs, semantic modeling, and downstream tools. section 8.3.1
