Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data directly in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) using standard SQL. With a few actions in the AWS Management Console, you can point Athena at your data stored in Amazon S3 and begin using standard SQL to run ad-hoc queries and get results in seconds.

What makes Athena so interesting is that a serverless solution may alter how many think about their data workflows. Since Athena accesses data directly from S3, users don’t need to concern themselves with setting up any servers, frameworks, clusters or other tools other than getting the data loaded to S3. This can be cost saving for use cases that do not require a traditional data warehouse.