What is the difference between Delta Lake and a lakehouse?

Delta Lake is an open-source storage layer that adds ACID transactions, schema enforcement, and time travel to data lakes built on top of cloud object storage. It provides reliable data pipelines by ensuring that reads and writes are atomic and consistent. A lakehouse, on the other hand, is an architectural paradigm that blends the best of data lakes and data warehouses: it stores raw, unstructured data in a lake while offering structured query capabilities, performance optimizations, and governance features typical of warehouses. Delta Lake can be considered a core component of a lakehouse because it supplies the transactional guarantees and schema management needed for analytical workloads. The key distinction is that Delta Lake is a technology, whereas a lakehouse is a broader design pattern that may incorporate Delta Lake along with other tools like caching layers, query engines, and metadata catalogs.