To summarize the answers below - it all depends on what you are trying to do. Data lakes are generally less structured than other things. They can also contain

To summarize the answers below - it all depends on what you are trying to do. Data lakes are generally less structured than other things. They can also contain non-text things, like images and videos that can also be mined. Sounds like you are thinking more of a data warehouse, which is structured data on an engine that’s designed for querying large volumes of data. I’d recommend first starting with your objectives and then going for what solves with least amount of “stuff”. I don’t work on data warehousing or pipelines now, but when I did a year ago, AWS and GCP both offered great tools with slight differences, where AWS was a bit pricier to start, but focused on more predictable pricing and GCP was much cheaper with pay as you go, but you could get yourself in trouble with cost by not following their best practices.