Managed Iceberg Data Lakes: A Guide

Apache Iceberg has become the default table format for open data lakes. The 2025 State of the Apache Iceberg Ecosystem survey found 96.4% Spark adoption, 60.7% Trino, and growing DuckDB and Flink usage. Ryft's 2026 enterprise study reports that 58% of organizations now use Iceberg for business-critical analytics, and 79% plan to move their remaining data to it within 12 months. Adoption is no longer the question. The question is: who maintains all of this? Iceberg gives you snapshot isolation, s