Which AWS service enables a user to run standard SQL queries directly against data stored in Amazon S3 without provisioning any servers, and charges based on the amount of data scanned?
A question asking to select the service that runs serverless SQL queries against S3.
Amazon Redshift
Amazon Redshift is a data warehouse designed to execute complex aggregations on large datasets at high speed.
Its basic usage model involves provisioning a cluster as an execution platform. The description in this question — 'no server provisioning, SQL directly to S3, billed by scan amount' — matches Athena, not Redshift. This is incorrect.
Amazon EMR
Amazon EMR is a big-data processing platform that runs frameworks such as Spark and Hadoop on a cluster.
It involves cluster configuration and management. For the requirement to query S3 data directly with standard SQL and without provisioning servers, Athena is more appropriate. This is incorrect.
Amazon Athena
This is correct. Amazon Athena is a serverless query service that enables customers to run standard SQL queries directly against data stored in Amazon S3. No server setup or management is required, and charges are based on the amount of data scanned by each query. It is well suited for log analysis and ad hoc analytics.
AWS Glue
AWS Glue is a serverless ETL service that extracts, transforms, and loads data.
Although it is serverless, its role is data transformation and integration, not running ad hoc SQL queries against S3 data to retrieve immediate results. This is incorrect.
'SQL against S3,' 'serverless,' and 'scan-based billing' all point to Amazon Athena. Distinguish: large-scale DWH = Redshift, ETL = Glue, visualization = QuickSight.