AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02) — Question 302

A company has been storing monthly reports in an Amazon S3 bucket. The company exports the report data into comma-separated values (.csv) files. A developer wants to write a simple query that can read all of these files and generate a summary report.

Which AWS service or feature should the developer use to meet these requirements with the LEAST amount of operational overhead?

Answer options

• A. Amazon S3 Select
• B. Amazon Athena
• C. Amazon Redshift
• D. Amazon EC2

Correct answer: B

Explanation

Amazon Athena is a serverless interactive query service that allows developers to run standard SQL queries directly on data stored in Amazon S3 with virtually no operational overhead. Amazon S3 Select is designed to retrieve subsets of data from single S3 objects rather than querying and aggregating across multiple files. Amazon Redshift and Amazon EC2 require provisioning and managing infrastructure, which significantly increases operational overhead compared to the serverless model of Amazon Athena.